
Class 

Book 

Copyright N?. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE 

SHEWING-UP OF 
BLANCO POSNET 

WITH PREFACE ON THE 
CENSORSHIP 

By 

BERNARD SHAW 







NEW YORK 

BRENTANO'S 

1913 






Copyright, 1900, by Breniano's 



Copyright, 1911, by O. Bernard Shaw 



©GlASeil-KS 



THE SHEWING-UP OF 
BLANCO POSNET 

XVIII 
1909 



7- 



PREFACE 

The Censorship 

This little play is really a religious tract in dramatic 
form. If our silly censorship would permit its perform- 
ance, it might possibly help to set right-side-up the per- 
verted conscience and re-invigorate the starved self-re- 
spect of our considerable class of loose-lived playgoers 
whose point of honor is to deride all official and conven- 
tional sermons. As it is, it only gives me an opportunity 
of telling the story of the Select Committee of both 
Houses of Parliament which sat last year to enquire into 
the working of the censorship, against which it was 
alleged by myself and others that as its imbecility and 
mischievousncss could not be fully illustrated within the 
limits of decorum imposed on the press, it could only be 
dealt with by a parliamentary body subject to no such 
limits. 

A Readable Bluebook 

Few books of the year 1909 can have been cheaper 
and more entertaining than the report of this Committee. 
Its full title is Report from the Joint Select Com- 
mittee OF the House of Lords and the House of 
Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship) together 
with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes 
of Evidence, and Appendices. What the phrase " the 
Stage Plays " means in this title I do not know ; nor 
does anyone else. The number of the Bluebook is 214, 



6 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

How interesting it is may be judged from the fact that 
it contains verbatim reports of long and animated in- 
terviews between the Committee and such witnesses as 
W. William Archer, Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. J. M. 
Barrie, Mr. Forbes Robertson, Mr. Cecil Raleigh, Mr. 
John Galsworthy, Mr. Laurence Housman, Sir Herbert 
Beerbohra Tree, Mr. W. L. Courtney, Sir William Gil- 
bert, Mr. A. B. Walkley, Miss Lena Ashwell, Professor 
Gilbert Murray, Mr. George Alexander, Mr. George Ed- 
wardes, Mr. Comyns Carr, the Speaker of the House of 
Commons, the Bishop of Southwark, Mr. Hall Caine, 
Mr. Israel Zangwill, Sir Squire Bancroft, Sir Arthur 
Pinero, and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, not to mention my- 
self and a number of gentlemen less well known to the 
general public, but important in the world of the theatre. 
The publication of a book by so many famous contribu- 
tors would be beyond the means of any commercial pub- 
lishing firm. His Majesty's Stationery Office sells it to 
all comers by weight at the very reasonable price of three- 
and-threepence a copy. 

How Not to Do It 

It was pointed out by Charles Dickens in Little Dor- 
rit, which remains the most accurate and penetrating 
study of the genteel littleness of our class governments 
in the English language, that whenever an abuse be- 
comes oppressive enough to persuade our party parlia- 
mentarians that something must be done, they immedi- 
ately set to work to face the situation and discover 
How Not To Do It. Since Dickens's day the exposures 
effected by the Socialists have so shattered the self-sat- 
isfaction of modern commercial civilization that it is no 
longer difficult to convince our governments that some- 
thing must be done, even to the extent of attempts at a 
reconstruction of civilization on a thoroughly uncommer- 



Preface 7 

cial basis. Consequently, the first part of the process 
described by Dickens: that in which the reformers were 
snubbed by front bench demonstrations that the admin- 
istrative departments were consuming miles of red tape 
in the correctest forms of activity, and that everything 
was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is out 
of fashion ; and we are in that other phase, familiarized 
by the history of the French Revolution, in which the 
primary assumption is that the country is in danger, and 
that the first duty of all parties, politicians, and govern- 
ments is to save it. But as the effect of this is to give 
governments a great many more things to do, it also 
gives a powerful stimulus to the art of How Not To Do 
Them: that is to say, the art of contriving methods of 
reform which will leave matters exactly as they are. 

The report of the Joint Select Committee is a capital 
illustration of this tendency. The case against the cen- 
sorship was overwhelming; and the defence was more 
damaging to it than no defence at all could have been. 
Even had this not been so, the mere caprice of opinion 
had turned against the institution; and a reform was ex- 
pected, evidence or no evidence. Therefore the Commit- 
tee was unanimous as to the necessity of reforming the 
censorshi}^; only, unfortunately, the majority attached to 
this unanimity the usual condition that nothing should be 
done to disturb the existing state of things. How this 
was effected may be gathered from the recommendations 
finally agreed on, which are as follows. 

1. The drama is to be set entirely free by the aboli- 
tion of the existing obligation to procure a licence from 
the Censor before performing a play; but every theatre 
lease is in future to be construed as if it contained a 
clause giving the landlord power to break it and evict 
the lessee if he produces a play without first obtaining 
the usual licence from the Lord Chamberlain. 

2. Some of the plays licensed by the Lord Chamber- 



8 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

lain are so vicious that their present practical immunity 
from prosecution must be put an end to; but no manager 
who procures the Lord Chamberlain's licence for a play 
can be punished in any way for producing it, though a 
special tribunal may order him to discontinue the per- 
formance; and even this order must not be recorded to 
his disadvantage on the licence of his theatre, nor may it 
be given as a judicial reason for cancelling that licence. 

3. Authors and managers producing plays without 
first obtaining the usual licence from the Lord Chamber- 
lain shall be perfectly free to do so, and shall be at no 
disadvantage compared to those who follow the existing 
practice, except that they may be punished, have the 
licences of their theatres endorsed and cancelled, and 
have the performance stopped pending the proceedings 
without compensation in the event of the proceedings 
ending in tlieir acquittal. 

4. Authors are to be rescued from their present sub- 
jection to an irresponsible secret tribunal Avhich can con- 
demn tlieir plays without giving reasons, bj^ the substi- 
tution for that tribunal of a Committee of the Privy 
Council, which is to be the final authority on the fitness 
of a play for representation ; and this Committee is to 
sit in camera if and when it pleases. 

5. The power to impose a veto on the production of 
plays is to be abolished because it may hinder the growth 
of a great national drama; but the Office of Examiner 
of Plays shall be continued; and the Lord Chamberlain 
shall retain his present powers to license plays, but shall 
be made responsible to Parliament to the extent of mak- 
ing it possible to ask questions there concerning his 
proceedings, especially now that members have discov- 
ered a method of doing this indirectly. 

And so on, and so forth. The thing is to be done; 
and it is not to be done. Everything is to be changed 
and nothing is to be changed. The problem is to be 



Preface 

faced and the solution to be shirked. And the word of 
Dickens is to be justified. 

The Story of the Joint Select 
Committee 

Let me now tell the story of the Committee in greater 
detail, partly as a contribution to history; partly be- 
cause, like most true stories, it is more amusing than the 
official story. 

All commissions of public enquiry arc more or less in- 
timidated both by the interests on which they have to 
sit in judgment and, when their members are party poli- 
ticians, by the votes at the back of those interests; but 
this unfortunate Committee sat under a quite exceptional 
cross fire. First, there was the king. The Censor is a 
member of his household retinue; and as a king's retinue 
has to be jealously guarded to avoid curtailment of the 
royal state no matter what may be the function of the 
particular retainer threatened, nothing but an express 
royal intimation to the contrary, which is a constitutional 
impossibility, could have relieved the Committee from 
the fear of displeasing the king by any proposal to abol- 
ish the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain. Now ail 
the lords on the Committee and some of the commoners 
could have been wiped out of society (in their sense of 
the word) by the slightest intimation that the king would 
prefer not to meet them; and this was a heavy risk to 
run on the chance of " a great and serious national 
drama " ensuing on the removal of the Lord Chamber- 
lain's veto ori Mrs Warren's Profession. Second, there 
was the Nonconformist conscience, holding the Liberal 
Government responsible for the Committee it had ap- 
pointed, and holding also, to the extent of votes enough 
to turn the scale in some constituencies, that the theatre 
is the gate of hell, to be tolerated, as vice is tolerated. 



10 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

only because the power to suppress it could not be given 
to any public body without too serious an interference 
with certain Liberal traditions of liberty which are still 
useful to Noncomformists in other directions. Third, 
there was the commercial interest of the theatrical man- 
agers and their syndicates of backers in the City, to 
whom, as I shall shew later on, the censorship affords a 
cheap insurance of enormous value. Fourth, there was 
the powerful interest of the trade in intoxicating liquors, 
fiercely determined to resist any extension of the author- 
ity of teetotaller-led local governing bodies over theatres. 
Fifth, there were the playwrights, without political 
power, but with a very close natural monopoly of a tal- 
ent not only for play-writing but for satirical polemics. 
And since every interest has its opposition, all these 
influences had created hostile bodies by the operation of 
the mere impulse to contradict them, always strong in 
English human nature. 

Why the Managers Love the 
Censorship 

The only one of these influences which seems to be 
generally misunderstood is that of the managers. It has 
been assumed repeatedly that managers and authors are 
affected in the same way by the censorship. When a 
prominent author protests against the censorship, his 
opinion is supposed to be balanced by that of some 
prominent manager who declares that the censorship is 
the mainstay of the theatre, and his relations with the 
Lord Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays a cher- 
ished privilege and an inexhaustible joy. This error 
was not removed by the evidence given before the Joint 
Select Committee. The managers did not make their 
case clear there, partly because they did not understand 
it, and partly because their most eminent witnesses were 



Preface 11 

not personally affected by it, and would not condescend 
to plead it, feeling themselves, on the contrary, com- 
pelled by their self-respect to admit and even emphasize 
the fact that the Lord Chamberlain in the exercise of 
his duties as licenser had done those things which he 
ought not to have done, and left undone those things 
which he ought to have done. Mr Forbes Robertson and 
Sir Herbert Tree, for instance, had never felt the real 
disadvantage of which managers have to complain. This 
disadvantage was not put directly to the Committee ; and 
though the managers are against me on the question of 
the censorship, I will now put their case for them as 
they should have put it themselves, and as it can be read 
between the lines of their evidence when once the reader 
has the clue. 

The manager of a theatre is a man of business. He is 
not an expert in politics, religion, art, literature, philos- 
ophy, or law. He calls in a playwright just as he calls 
in a doctor, or consults a lawyer, or engages an 
architect, depending on the playwright's reputation and 
past achievements for a satisfactory result. A play by 
an unknown man may attract him sufficiently to induce 
him to give that unknown man a trial; but this does not 
occur often enough to be taken into account: his normal 
course is to resort to a well-known author and take 
(mostly with misgiving) what he gets from him. Now 
this does not cause any anxiety to Mr Forbes Robertson 
and Sir Herbert Tree, because they are only incidentally 
managers and men of business : primarily they are highly 
cultivated artists, quite capable of judging for them- 
selves anything that the most abstruse playwright is 
likely to put before them. But the plain sailing trades- 
man who must be taken as the typical manager (for the 
west end of London is not the whole theatrical world) 
is by no means equally qualified to judge whetlicr a play 
is safe from prosecution or not. He may not understand 



12 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

itj may not like it, may not know what the author is 
driving at, may have no knowledge of the ethical, polit- 
ical, and sectarian controversies which may form the in- 
tellectual fabric of the play, and may honestly see noth- 
ing but an ordinary *' character part " in a stage figure 
which may be a libellous and unmistakeable caricature of 
some eminent living person of whom he has never heard. 
Yet if he produces the play he is legally responsible 
just as if he had written it himself. Without protection 
he may find himself in the dock answering a charge of 
blasphemous libel, seditious libel, obscene libel, or all 
three together, not to mention the possibility of a private 
action for defamatory libel. His sole refuge is the opin- 
ion of the Examiner of Plays, his sole protection the 
licence of the Lord Chamberlain. A refusal to license 
does not hurt him, because he can produce another play: 
it is the author who suffers. The granting of the licence 
practically places him above the law; for though it may 
be legally possible to prosecute a licensed play, nobody 
ever dreams of doing it. The really responsible person, 
the Lord Chamberlain, could not be put into the dock; 
and the manager could not decently be convicted when 
he could procure in his defence a certificate from the 
chief officer of the King's household that the play was a 
proper one. 

A Two Guinea Insurance Policy 

The censorship, then, provides the manager, at the 
negligible premium of two guineas per play, with an 
effective insurance against the author getting him into 
trouble, and a complete relief from all conscientious re- 
sponsibility for the character of the entertainment at his 
theatre. Under such circumstances, managers would be 
more than human if they did not regard the censorship 
as their most valuable privilege. This is the simple ex- 



Preface 13 

planation of the rally of the managers and their Asso- 
ciations to the defence of the censorship, of their reit- 
erated resolutions of confidence in the Lord Chamber- 
lain, of their jjresentations of plate, and, generally, of 
their enthusiastic contentment with the present system, 
all in such startling contrast to the denunciations of the 
censorship by the authors. It also explains why the 
managerial witnesses who had least to fear from the 
Censor were the most reluctant in his defence, whilst 
those whose practice it is to strain his indulgence to the 
utmost were almost rapturous in his praise. There 
would be absolute unanimity among the managers in 
favor of the censorship if they were all simply trades- 
men. Even those actor-managers who made no secret 
before the Committee of their contempt for the present 
operation of the censorship, and their indignation at 
being handed over to a domestic official as casual serv- 
ants of a specially disorderly kind, demanded, not the 
abolition of the institution, but such a reform as might 
make it consistent with their dignity and unobstructive 
to their higher artistic aims. Feeling no personal need 
for protection against the author, they perhaps forgot 
the plight of many a manager to whom the modern ad- 
vanced drama is so much Greek; but they did feel very 
strongly the need of being protected against Vigilance 
Societies and Municipalities and common informers in a 
country where a large section of the community still be- 
lieves that art of all kinds is inherently sinful. 

Why the Government Interfered 

It may now be asked how a Liberal government had 
been persuaded to meddle at all with a question in which 
so many conflicting interests were involved, and which 
had probably no electoral value whatever. Many simple 
souls believed that it was because certain severely virtu- 



14 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

ous plays by Ibsen, by M. Brieux, by Mr Granville 
Barker, and by me, were suppressed by the censorship, 
whilst plays of a scandalous character were licensed 
without demur. No doubt this influenced public opinion; 
but those who imagine that it could influence British 
governments little know how remote from public opinion 
and how full of their own little family and party affairs 
British governments, both Liberal and Unionist, still are. 
The censorship scandal had existed for years without 
any parliamentary action being taken in the matter, and 
might have existed for as many more had it not hap- 
pened in 1906 that Mr Robert Vernon Harcourt entered 
parliament as a member of the Liberal Party, of which 
his father had been one of the leaders during the Glad- 
stone era. Mr Harcourt was thus a yoimg man marked 
out for office both by his parentage and his unquestion- 
able social position as one of the governing class. Also, 
and this was much less usual, he was brilliantly clever, 
and was the author of a couple of plays of remarkable 
promise. Mr Harcourt informed his leaders that he was 
going to take up the subject of the censorship. The 
leaders, recognizing his hereditary right to a parliament- 
ary canter of some sort as a prelude to his public career, 
and finding that all the clever people seemed to be 
agreed that the censorship was an anti-Liberal institu- 
tion and an abominable nuisance to boot, indulged him 
by appointing a Select Committee of both Houses to 
investigate the subject. The then Chancellor of the 
Duchy of Lancaster, Mr Herbert Samuel (now Post- 
master-General), who had made his way into the Cabinet 
twenty years ahead of the usual age, was made Chair- 
man. Mr Robert Harcourt himself was of course a 
member. With him, representing the Commons, were 
Mr Alfred Mason, a man of letters who had won a seat 
in parliament as offhandedly as he has since discarded it, 
or as he once appeared on the stage to help me out of 



Preface 15 

a difficulty in casting Arms and the Man when that piece 
was the newest thing in the advanced drama. There was 
Mr Hugh Law, an Irish member, son of an Irish Chan- 
cellor, presenting a keen and joyous front to English 
intellectual sloth. Above all, there was Colonel Lock- 
wood to represent at one stroke the Opposition and the 
average popular man. This he did by standing up gal- 
lantly for the Censor, to whose support the Opposition 
was in no way committed, and by visibly defying the 
most cherished conventions of the average man with a 
bunch of carnations in his buttonhole as large as a din- 
ner-plate, which would have made a Bunthorne blench, 
and which very nearly did make Mr Granville Barker 
(who has an antipathy to the scent of carnations) faint. 



The Peers on the Jomt Select 
Committee 

The House of Lords then proceeded to its selection. 
As fashionable drama in Paris and London concerns 
itself almost exclusively with adultery, the first choice 
fell on Lord Gorell, who had for many years presided 
over the Divorce Court. Lord Plymouth, who had been 
Chairman to the Shakespear Memorial project (now 
merged in the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre) 
was obviously marked out for selection; and it was gen- 
erally exi^ected that the Lords Lytton and Esher, who 
had taken a prominent part in the same movement, would 
have been added. This expectation was not fulfilled. 
Instead, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who had distin- 
guished himself as an amateur actor, was selected along 
with Lord Newton, whose special qualifications for the 
Committee, if he had any, were unknown to the public. 
Finally Lord Ribblesdale, the argute son of a Scotch 
mother, was thrown in to make up for any shortcoming 



16 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

in intellectual subtlety that might arise in the case of his 
younger colleagues; and this completed the two teams. 



The Committee's Attitude towards 
the Theatre 

In England, thanks chiefly to the censorship, the the- 
atre is not respected. It is indulged and despised as a 
department of what is politely called gaiety. It is there- 
fore not surprising that the majority of the Committee 
began by taking its work uppishly and carelessly. When 
it discovered that the contemporary drama, licensed by 
the Lord Chamberlain, included plays which could be 
described only behind closed doors, and in the discom- 
fort which attends discussions of very nasty subjects be- 
tween men of widely different ages, it calmly put its 
own convenience before its public duty by ruling that 
there should be no discussion of particular plays, much 
as if a committee on temperance were to rule that drunk- 
enness was not a proper subject of conversation aiuong 
gentlemen. 

A Bad Beginning 

This was a bad beginning. Everybody knew that in 
England the censorship would not be crushed by the 
weight of the constitutional argument against it, heavy 
as that was, unless it were also brought home to the Com- 
mittee and to the public that it had sanctioned and pro- 
tected the very worst practicable examples of the kind 
of play it professed to extirpate. For it must be remem- 
bered that the other half of the practical side of the case, 
dealing with the merits of the plays it had suppressed, 
could never secure a unanimous assent. If the Censor 
had suppressed Hamlet, as he most certainly would have 
done had it been submitted to him as a new play, he 



Preface 17 

would have been supported by a large body of people to 
whom incest is a tabooed subject which must not be men- 
tioned on the stage or anywhere else outside a criminal 
court. Hamlet, Oedipus, and The Cenci, Mrs Warren's 
Profession, Brieux's Maternite, and Les Avaries, Maeter- 
linck's Monna Vanna and Mr. Granville Barker's Waste 
may or may not be great poems, or edifying sermons, or 
important documents, or charming romances : our tribal 
citizens know nothing about that and do not want to 
know anything: all that they do know is that incest, 
prostitution, abortion, contagious diseases, and nudity 
are improper, and that all conversations, or books, or 
plays in which they are discussed are improper conversa- 
tions, improper books, improper plays, and should not 
be allowed. The Censor may prohibit all such plays 
with complete certainty that there will be a chorus of 
" Quite right too " sufficient to drown the protests of 
the few who know better. The Achilles heel of the cen- 
sorship is therefore not the fine plays it has suppressed, 
but the abominable plays it has licensed: plays which 
the Committee itself had to turn the public out of the 
room and close the doors before it could discuss, and 
which I myself have found it impossible to expose in the 
press because no editor of a paper or magazine intended 
for general family reading could admit into his columns 
the baldest narration of the stories which the Censor has 
not only tolerated but expressly certified as fitting for 
presentation on the stage. When the Committee ruled 
out this part of the case it shook the confidence of the 
authors in its impartiality and its seriousness. Of course 
it was not able to enforce its ruling thoroughly. Plays 
which were merely lightminded and irresponsible in their 
viciousness were repeatedly mentioned by Mr Harcourt 
and others. But the really detestable plays, which would 
have damned the censorship beyond all apology or sal- 
vation, were never referred to; and the moment Mr Har- 



18 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

court or anyone else made the Committee uncomfortable 
by a move in their direction^ the ruling was appealed to 
at once, and the censorship saved. 



A Comic Interlude 

It was part of this nervous dislike of the unpleasant 
part of its business that led to the comic incident of 
the Committee's sudden discovery that I had insulted it, 
and its suspension of its investigation for the purpose of 
elaborately insulting me back again. Comic to the look- 
ers-on, that is; for the majority of the Committee made 
no attempt to conceal the fact that they were wildly 
angry with me; and I, though my public experience and 
skill in acting enabled me to maintain an appearance of 
imperturbable good-humor, was equally furious. The 
friction began as follows. 

The precedents for the conduct of the Committee were 
to be found in the proceedings of the Committee of 1892. 
That Committee, no doubt recognizing the absurdity of 
calling on distinguished artists to give their views be- 
fore it, and then refusing to allow them to state their 
views except in nervous replies to such questions as it 
might suit members to put to them, allowed Sir Henry 
Irving and Sir John Hare to prepare and read written 
statements, and formally invited them to read them to 
the Committee before being questioned. I accordingly 
prepared such a statement. For the greater convenience 
of the Committee, I offered to have this statement 
printed at my own expense, and to supply the members 
with copies. The offer was accepted; and the copies 
supplied. I also offered to provide the Committee with 
copies of those plays of mine which had been refused a 
licence by the Lord Chamberlain. That offer also was 
accepted; and the books duly supplied. 



Preface 19 

An Anti- Shavian Panic 

As far as I can guess, the next thing that happened 
was that some timid or unawakened member of the Com- 
mittee read my statement and was frightened or scan- 
dalized out of his wits by it. At all events it is certain 
that the majority of the Committee allowed themselves to 
be persuaded to refuse to allow any statement to be 
read; but to avoid the appearance of pointing this ex- 
pressly at me, the form adopted was a resolution to ad- 
here strictly to precedent, the Committee being then un- 
aware that the precedents were on my side. Accord- 
ingly, when I appeared before the Committee, and pro- 
posed to read my statement " according to precedent," 
the Committee was visibly taken aback. The Chairman 
was bound by the letter of the decision arrived at to 
allow me to read my statement, since that course was 
according to precedent; but as this was exactly what 
the decision was meant to prevent, the majority of 
the Committee would have regarded this hoisting of them 
with their own petard as a breach of faith on the part 
of the Chairman, who, I infer, was not in agreement with 
the suppressive majority. There was nothing for it, 
after a somewhat awkward pause, but to clear me and 
the public out of the room and reconsider the situation in 
camera. When the doors were opened again I was in- 
formed simply that the Committee would not hear my 
statement. But as the Committee could not very de- 
cently refuse my evidence altogether, the Chairman, with 
a printed copy of my statement in his hand as " proof," 
was able to come to the rescue to some extent by putting 
to me a series of questions to which no doubt I might 
have replied by taking another copy out of my pocket, 
and quoting my statement paragraph by paragraph, as 
some of the later witnesses did. But as in offering the 
Committee my statement for burial in their bluebook I 



20 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

had made a considerable sacrifice, being able to secure 
greater publicity for it by independent publication on my 
own account; and as, further, the circumstances of the 
refusal made it offensive enough to take all heart out of 
the scrupulous consideration with which I had so far 
treated the Committee, I was not disposed to give its 
majority a second chance, or to lose the opportunity 
offered me by the questions to fire an additional broad- 
side into tlie censorship. I pocketed my statement, and 
answered the questions viva voce. At the conclusion of 
this, my examination-in-chief, the Committee adjourned, 
asking me to present myself again for (virtually) cross- 
examination. But this cross-examination never came off, 
as the sequel will shew. 

A Rare and Curious First Edition 

The refusal of the Committee to admit my statement 
had not unnaturally created the impression that it must 
be a scandalous document; and a livel}'^ demand for cop- 
ies at once set in. And among the very first applicants 
were members of the majority which had carried the de- 
cision to exclude the document. They had given so little 
attention to the business that they did not know, or had 
forgotten, that they had already been supplied with cop- 
ies at their own request. At all events, they came to me 
publicly and cleaned me out of the handful of copies I 
had provided for distribution to the press. And after 
the sitting it was intimated to me that yet more copies 
were desired for the use of the Committee: a demand, 
under the circumstances, of breath-bereaving coolness. 
At the same time, a brisk demand arose outside the Com- 
mittee, not only among people who were anxious to read 
what I had to say on the subject, but among victims of 
the craze for collecting first editions, copies of privately 
circulated pamphlets, and other real or imaginary rari- 



Preface 21 

ties, and who will cheerfully pay five guineas for any 
piece of discarded old rubbish of mine when they will 
not pay four-nnd-sixpence for this book because every- 
one else can get it for four-and-sixpence too. 

The Times to the Rescue 

The day after the refusal of the Committee to face my 
statement, I transferred the scene of action to the col- 
umns of The Times, which did yeoman's service to the 
public on this, as on many other occasions, by treating 
the question as a public one without the least regard to 
the supposed susceptibilities of the Court on the one 
side, or the avowed prejudices of the Free Churches or 
the interests of the managers or theatrical speculators 
on the other. The Times published the summarized con- 
clusions of my statement, and gave me an opportunity 
of saying as much as it was then advisable to say of 
what had occurred. For it must be remembered that, 
however impatient and contemptuous I might feel of the 
intellectual cowardice shewn by the majority of the Com- 
mittee face to face with myself, it was none the less nec- 
essary to keep up its prestige in every possible way, not 
only for the sake of the dignity and importance of the 
matter with which it had to deal, and in the hope that 
the treatment of subsequent witnesses and the final re- 
port might make amends for a feeble beginning, but also 
out of respect and consideration for the minority. For 
it is fair to say that the majority was never more than 
a bare majority, and that the worst thing the Committee 
did — the exclusion of references to particular plays — 
was perpetrated in the absence of the Chairman. 

I, therefore, had to treat the Committee in The Times 
very much better than its majority deserved, an injustice 
for which I now apologize. I did not, however, resist 
the temptation to hint, quite good-humoredly, that my 



22 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

politeness to the Committee had cost me quite enough 
already, and that I was not prepared to supply the mem- 
bers of the Committee, or anyone else, with extra copies 
merely as collectors' curiosities. 

The Council of Ten 

Then the fat was in the fire. The majority, chaffed 
for its eagerness to obtain copies of scarce pamphlets 
retailable at five guineas, went dancing mad. When I 
presented myself, as requested, for cross-examination, I 
found the doors of the Committee room shut, and the 
corridors of the House of Lords filled by a wondering 
crowd, to whom it had somehow leaked out that some- 
thing terrible was happening inside. It could not be 
another licensed play too scandalous to be discussed in 
public, because the Committee had decided to discuss no 
more of these examples of the Censor's notions of puri- 
fying the stage; and what else the Committee might 
have to discuss that might not be heard by all the world 
was not easily guessable. 

Without suggesting that the confidence of the Com- 
mittee was in any way violated by any of its members 
further than was absolutely necessary to clear them from 
suspicion of complicity in the scene which followed, I 
think I may venture to conjecture what was happening. 
It was felt by the majority, first, that it must be cleared 
at all costs of the imputation of having procured more 
than one copy each of my statement, and that one not 
from any interest in an undesirable document by an ir- 
reverent author, but in the reluctant discharge of its sol- 
emn public duty; second, that a terrible example must be 
made of me by the most crushing public snub in the 
power of the Committee to administer. To throw my 
wretched little pamphlet at my head and to kick me out 
of the room was the passionate impulse which prevailed 



Preface 23 

in spite of all the remonstrances of the Commoners, sea- 
soned to the give-and-take of public life, and of the 
single peer who kept his head. The others, for the mo- 
ment, had no heads to keep. And the fashion in which 
they proposed to wreak their vengeance was as follows. 

The Sentence 

I was to be admitted, as a lamb to the slaughter, and 
allowed to take my place as if for further examination. 
The Chairman was then to inform mc coldly that the 
Committee did not desire to have anything more to say 
to me. The members were thereupon solemnly to hand 
me back the copies of my statement as so much waste 
paper, and I was to be suffered to slink away with what 
countenance I could maintain in such disgrace. 

But this plan required the active co-operation of every 
member of the Committee; and whilst the majority re- 
garded it as an august and impressive vindication of the 
majesty of parliament, the minority regarded it with 
equal conviction as a puerile tomfoolery, and declined 
altogether to act their allotted parts in it. Besides, they 
did not all want to part with the books. For instance, 
Mr Hugh Law, being an Irishman, with an Irishman's 
sense of how to behave like a gallant gentleman on occa- 
sion, was determined to be able to assure me that nothing 
should induce him to give up my statement or prevent 
him from obtaining and cherishing as many copies as 
possible. (I quote this as an example to the House of 
Lords of the right thing to say in such emergencies). 
So the program had to be modified. The minority could 
not prevent the enraged majority from refusing to exam- 
ine me further; nor could the Chairman refuse to com- 
municate that decision to me. Neither could the minor- 
ity object to the secretary handing me back such copies 
as he could collect from the majority. And at that the 



24 The Shewlng-Up of Blanco Posnet 

matter was left. The doors were opened; the audience 
trooped in ; I was called to my place in the dock (so to 
speak) ; and all was ready for the sacrifice. 

The Execution 

Alas ! the ma j ority reckoned without Colonel Lock- 
wood. That hardy and undaunted veteran refused to 
shirk his share in the scene merely because the minority 
was recalcitrant and the majority perhaps subject to 
stage fright. When Mr Samuel had informed me that 
the Committee had no further questions to ask me with 
an urbanity which gave the public no clue as to the tem- 
per of the majority; when I had jumped up with the 
proper air of relief and gratitude; when the secretary 
had handed me his little packet of books with an affa- 
bility which effectually concealed his dramatic function 
as executioner; when the audience was simply disap- 
pointed at being baulked of the entertainment of hearing 
Mr Robert Harcourt cross-examine me; in short, when 
the situation was all but saved by the tact of the Chair- 
man and secretary, Colonel Lockwood rose, with all his 
carnations blazing, and gave away the whole case by 
handing me, with impressive simplicity and courtesy, his 
two copies of the precious statement. And I believe that 
if he had succeeded in securing ten, he would have 
handed them all back to me with the most sincere convic- 
tion that every one of the ten must prove a crushing ad- 
dition to the weight of my discomfiture. I still cherish 
that second copy, a little blue-bound pamphlet, method- 
ically autographed " Lockwood B " among my most val- 
ued literary trophies. 

An innocent lady told me afterwards that she never 
knew that I could smile so beautifully, and that she 
thought it shewed very good taste on my part. I was 
not conscious of smiling; but I should have embraced 



^Preface ^6 

the Colonel had I dared. As it was, I turned expectantly 
to his colleagues, mutely inviting them to follow his ex- 
ample. But there was only one Colonel Lockwood on 
that Committee. No eye met mine except minority eyes, 
dancing with mischief. There was nothing more to be 
said. I went home to my morning's work, and returned 
in the afternoon to receive the apologies of the minority 
for the conduct of the majority, and to see Mr Granville 
Barker, overwhelmed by the conscience-stricken polite- 
ness of the now almost abject Committee, and by a pow- 
erful smell of carnations, heading the long list of play- 
wrights who came there to testify against the censorship, 
and whose treatment, I am happy to say, was everjrthing 
they could have desired. 

After all, ridiculous as the scene was. Colonel Lock- 
wood's simplicity and courage were much more service- 
able to his colleagues than their own inept coup de the- 
atre would have been if he had not spoiled it. It was 
plain to every one that he had acted in entire good faith, 
without a thought as to these apparently insignificant 
little books being of any importance or having caused me 
or anybody else any trouble, and that he was wounded 
in his most sensitive spot by the construction my Times 
letter had put on his action. And in Colonel Lockwood's 
case one saw the case of his party on the Committee. 
They had simply been thoughtless in the matter. 

I hope nobody will suppose that this in any Avay ex- 
onerates them. When people accept public service for 
one of the most vital duties that can arise in our society, 
they have no right to be thoughtless. In spite of the 
fun of the scene on the surface, my public sense was, 
and still is, very deeply offended by it. It made an end 
for me of the claim of the majority to be taken seriously. 
When the Government comes to deal with the question, 
as it presumably will before long, I invite it to be guided 
by the Chairman, the minority, and by the witnesses ac- 



26 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

cording to their weight, and to pay no attention whatever 
to those recommendations which were obviously inserted 
solely to conciliate the majority and get the report 
through and the Committee done with. 

My evidence will be found in the Bluebook, pp. 46-53. 
And here is the terrible statement which the Committee 
went through so much to suppress. 



THE REJECTED STATEMENT 

Part I 

The Witness's Qualifications 

I AM by profession a playwright. I have been in prac- 
tice since 1892. I am a member of the Managing Com- 
mittee of the Society of Authors and of the Dramatic 
Sub-Committee of that body. I have written nineteen 
plays, some of which have been translated and performed 
in all European countries except Turkey, Greece, and 
Portugal. They have been performed extensively in 
America. Three of them have been refused licences by 
the Lord Chamberlain. In one case a licence has since 
been granted. The other two are still unlicensed. I 
have suffered both in pocket and reputation by the action 
of the Lord Qhamberlain. In other countries I have not 
come into conflict with the censorship except in Austria, 
where the production of a comedy of mine was post- 
poned for a year because it alluded to the part taken by 
Austria in the Servo-Bulgarian war. This comedy was 
not one of the plays suppressed in England by the Lord 
Chamberlain. One of the plays so suppressed was 
prosecuted in America by the police in consequence of 
an immense crowd of disorderly persons having been 
attracted to the first performance by the Lord Chamber- 
lain's condemnation of it; but on appeal to a higher 
court it was decided that the representation was lawful 
and the intention innocent, since when it has been re- 
peatedly performed. 

I am not an ordinary playwright in general practice. 



28 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My 
reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to 
force the public to reconsider its morals. In particular, 
I regard much current morality as to economic and sex- 
ual relations as disastrously wrong; and I regard certain 
doctrines of the Christian religion as understood in Eng- 
land to-day with abhorrence. I write plays with the de- 
liberate object of converting the nation to my opinions 
in these matters. I have no other effectual incentive to 
write plays, as I am not dependent on the theatre for 
my livelihood. If I were prevented from producing im- 
moral and heretical plays, I should cease to write for the 
theatre, and propagate my views from the platform and 
through books. I mention these facts to shew that I 
have a special interest in the achievement by my profes- 
sion of those rights of liberty of speech and conscience 
which are matters of course in otlier professions. I ob- 
ject to censorship not merely because the existing form 
of it grievously injures and hinders me individually, but 
on public grounds. 

The Definition of Immorahty 

In dealing with the question of the censorship, every- 
thing depends on the correct use of the word immorality, 
and a careful discrimination between the powers of a 
magistrate or judge to administer a code, and those of 
a censor to please himself. 

Whatever is contrary to established manners and cus- 
toms is immoral. An immoral act or doctrine is not nec- 
essarily a sinful one: on the contrary, every advance in 
thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it 
has converted the majority. For this reason it is of the 
most enormous importance that immorality should be 
protected jealously against the attacks of those who have 
no standard except the standard of custom, and who re- 



The Rejected Statement 29 

gard any attack on custom — that is, on morals — as an 
attack on society, on religion, and on virtue. 

A censor is never intentionally a protector of immoral- 
ity. He always aims at the protection of morality. Now 
morality is extremely valuable to society. It imposes 
conventional conduct on the great mass of persons who 
are incapable of original ethical judgment, and who 
would be quite lost if they were not in leading-strings 
devised by lawgivers, philosophers, prophets and poets 
for their guidance. But morality is not dependent on 
censorship for protection. It is already powerfully for- 
tified by the magistracy and the whole body of law. 
Blasphemy, indecency, libel, treason, sedition, obscenity, 
profanity, and all the other evils which a censorship is 
supposed to avert, are punishable by the civil magistrate 
with all the severity of vehement prejudice. Morality 
has not only every engine that lawgivers can devise in 
full operation for its protection, but also that enormous 
weight of public opinion enforced by social ostracism 
which is stronger than all the statutes. A censor pre- 
tending to protect morality is like a child pushing the 
cushions of a railway carriage to give itself the sen- 
sation of making the train travel at sixty miles an hour. 
It is immorality, not morality, that needs protection: it 
is morality, not immorality, that needs restraint; for 
morality, with all the dead weight of human inertia and 
superstition to hang on the back of the pioneer, and all 
the malice of vulgarity and prejudice to threaten him, 
is responsible for many persecutions and many mar- 
tyrdoms 

Persecutions and martyrdoms, however, are trifles 
compared to the mischief done by censorships in delay- 
ing the general march of enlightenment. This can be 
brought home to us by imagining what would have been 
the effect of applying to all literature the censorship we 
still apply to the stage. The works of Linnaeus and 



30 The Shewing-Uj) of Blanco Posnet 

the evolutionists of 1790-1830, of Darwin, Wallace, 
Huxley, Helmlioltz, Tyndall, Spencer, Carlyle, Ruskin, 
and Samuel Butler, would not have been published, as 
they were all immoral and heretical in the very highest 
degree, and gave pain to many worthy and pious people. 
They are at pi'csent condemned by the Greek and 
Roman Catholic censorships as unfit for general reading. 
A censorship of conduct woitld have been equally disas- 
trous. The disloyalty of Hampden and of Washington; 
the revolting immorality of Luther in not only marrying 
when he was a priest, but actually marrying a nun; the 
heterodoxy of Galileo; the shocking blasphemies and 
sacrileges of Mohammed against the idols whom he de- 
throned ,to make way for his conception of one god ; the 
still more startling blasphemy of Jesus when he declared 
God to be the son of man and himself to be the son of 
God, are all examples of shocking immoralities (every 
immorality shocks somebody), the suppression and ex- 
tinction of which would have been more disastrous than 
the utmost mischief that can be conceived as ensuing 
from the toleration of vice. 

These facts, glaring as they arc, are disguised by the 
promotion of immoralities into moralities which is con- 
stantly going on. Christianity and Mohammedanism, 
once thouglit of and dealt with exactly as Anarchism is 
thought of and dealt with today, have become established 
religions ; and fresh immoralities are presecuted in their 
name. The truth is that tlie vast majority of persons pro- 
fessing these religions have never been anything but sim- 
ple moralists. The respectable Englishman who is a 
Christian because he was born in Clapham would be a 
Mohammedan for the cognate reason if he had been born 
in Constantinople. He has never willingly tolerated 
immorality. He did not adopt any innovation until it 
had become moral; and then he adopted it, not on its 
merits^ but solely because it had become moral. In doing 



The Rejected Statement 31 

so he never realized that it had ever been immoral: con- 
sequently its earlj'^ struggles taught him no lesson; and 
he has opposed the next step in human progress as in- 
dignantly as if neither manners^ customs, nor thought 
had ever changed since the beginning of the world. Tol- 
eration must be imposed on him as a mystic and painful 
duty by his spiritual and political leaders, or he will 
condemn the world to stagnation, which is the penalty 
of an inflexible morality. 

What Toleration Means 

This must be done all the more arbitrarily because it 
is not possible to make the ordinary moral man under- 
stand what toleration and liberty really mean. He will 
accept them verbally with alacrity, even with enthusiasm, 
because the word toleration has been moralized by emi- 
nent Whigs ; but what he means by toleration is tolera- 
tion of doctrines that he considers enlightened, and, by 
liberty, liberty to do what he considers right: that is, 
he does not mean toleration or liberty at all; for there 
is no need to tolerate what appears enlightened or to 
claim liberty to do what most people consider right. 
Toleration and liberty have no sense or use except as 
toleration of opinions that are considered damnable, and 
liberty to do what seems wrong. Setting Englishmen 
free to marry their deceased wife's sisters is not tolerated 
by the people who approve of it, bnt by the people who 
regard it as incestuous. Catholic Emancipation and the 
admission of Jews to parliament needed no toleration 
from Catholics and Jews : the toleration they needed was 
that of the people who regarded the one measure as a 
facilitation of idolatry, and the other as a condonation 
of the crucifixion. Clearly such toleration is not clam- 
ored for by the multitude or by the press which reflects 
its prejudices. It is essentially one of those abnegations 



32 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

of passion and prejudice which the common man submits 
to because uncommon men whom he respects as wiser 
than himself assure him that it must be so, or the higher 
affairs of human destiny will suffer. 

Such admission is the more difficult because the argu- 
ments against tolerating immorality are the same as 
the arguments against tolerating murder and theft; and 
this is why the Censor seems to the inconsiderate as ob- 
viously desirable a functionary as the police magistrate. 
But there is this simple and tremendous difference be- 
tween the cases : that whereas no evil can conceivably 
result from the total suppression of murder and theft, 
and all communities prosper in direct proportion to such 
suppression, the total suppression of immorality, espe- 
cially in matters of religion and sex, would stop enlight- 
enment, and produce Avhat used to be called a Chinese 
civilization until the Chinese lately took to immoral 
courses by permitting railway contractors to desecrate 
the graves of their ancestors, and their soldiers to wear 
clothes which indecently revealed the fact that they had 
legs and waists and even posteriors. At about the same 
moment a few bold Englishwomen ventured on the im- 
morality of riding astride their horses, a practice that 
has since established itself so successfully that before 
another generation has passed away there may not be a 
new side-saddle in England or a woman who could use 
it if there was. 

The Case for Toleration 

Accordingly, there has risen among wise and far- 
sighted men a perception of the need for setting certain 
departments of human activity entirely free from legal 
interference. This has nothing to do with any sympa- 
thy these liberators may themselves have with immoral 
views. A man with the strongest conviction of the Di- 



The Rejected Statement 33 

vine ordering of the universe and of the superiority of 
monarchy to all forms of government may nevertheless 
quite consistently and conscientiously be ready to lay 
down his life for the right of every man to advocate 
Atheism or Republicanism if he believes in them. An 
attack on morals may turn out to be the salvation of the 
race. A hundred years ago nobody foresaw that Tom 
Paine's centenary would be the subject of a laudatory 
special article in The Times; and only a few imderstood 
that the persecution of his works and the transportation 
of men for the felony of reading them was a mischievous 
mistake. Even less, perhaps, could they have guessed 
that Proudhon, who became notorious by his essay en- 
titled "What is Property.'' It is Theft" would have re- 
ceived, on the like occasion and in the same paper, a 
respectful consideration which nobody would now dream 
of according to Lord Liverpool or Lord Brougham. 
Nevertheless there was a mass of evidence to shew that 
such a development was not only possible but fairly 
probable, and that the risks of suppressing liberty of 
propaganda were far greater than the risk of Paine's or 
Proudhon's writings wrecking civilization. Now there 
was no such evidence in favor of tolerating the cutting 
of throats and the robbing of tills. No case whatever 
can be made out for the statement that a nation cannot 
do without common thieves and homicidal ruffians. But 
an overwhelming case can be made out for the statement 
that no nation can prosper or even continue to exist 
without heretics and advocates of shockingly immoral 
doctrines. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which 
were nothing but censorships, made ruthless war on im- 
piety and immorality. The result was once familiar to 
Englishmen, though of late years it seems to have been 
forgotten. It cost England a revolution to get rid of 
the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid of the Inqui- 
sition, and paid for that omission by becoming a barely 



34 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power 
at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the 
mightiest of the Christian empires. 

The Limits to Toleration 

But the large toleration these considerations dictate 
has limits. For example, though we tolerate, and rightly 
tolerate, the propaganda of Anarchism as a political the- 
ory which embraces all that is valuable in the doctrine 
of Laisser-Faire and the method of Free Trade as well 
as all that is shocking in the views of Bakounine, we 
clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate assas- 
sination of rulers on the ground that it is " propaganda 
by deed " or sociological experiment. A play inciting to 
such an assassination cannot claim the privileges of her- 
esy or immorality, because no case can be made out in 
support of assassination as an indispensable instrument 
of progress. Now it happens that we have in the Julius 
Caesar of Shakespear a play which the Tsar of Russia or 
the Governor-General of India would hardly care to see 
performed in their capitals just now. It is an artistic 
treasure; but it glorifies a murder which Goethe de- 
scribed as the silliest crime ever committed. It may 
quite possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see 
themselves, as it certainly helped generations of Whig 
statesmen to see them, in a heroic light; and it unques- 
tionably vindicates and ennobles a conspirator who 
assassinated the head of the Roman State not because he 
abused his position but solely because he occupied it, 
thus affirming the extreme republican principle that all 
kings, good or bad, should be killed because kingship 
and freedom cannot live together. Under certain cir- 
cumstances this vindication and ennoblement might act 
as an incitement to an actual assassination as well as to 
Plutarchian republicanism; for it is one thing to advo- 



The Rejected Statement 35 

cate republicanism or royalisni: it is quite another to 
make a hero of Brutus or Ravaillac, or a heroine of 
Charlotte Corday. Assassination is the extreme form of 
censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to 
it on anti-censorial principles. The very people who 
would have scouted the notion of prohibiting the per- 
formances of Julius Caesar at His Majesty's Theatre in 
London last year, might now entertain very seriously a 
proposal to exclude Indians from them, and to suppress 
the play completely in Calcutta and Dublin; for if the 
assassin of Caesar was a hero, why not the assassins of 
Lord Frederick Cavendish, Presidents Lincoln and 
McKinley, and Sir Curzon Wyllie? Here is a strong 
case for some constitutional means of preventing the per- 
formance of a play. True, it is an equally strong case 
for preventing the circulation of the Bible, which was 
always in the hands of our regicides ; but as the Roman 
Catholic Church does not hesitate to accept that conse- 
quence of the censorial principle, it does not invalidate 
the argument. 

Take another actual case. A modern comedy. Arms 
and The Man, though not a comedy of politics, is never- 
theless so far historical that it reveals the unacknowl- 
edged fact that as the Servo-Bulgarian War of 1885 
was much more than a struggle between the Servians 
and Bulgarians, the troops engaged were officered by 
two European Powers of the first magnitude. In conse- 
quence, the performance of the play was for some time 
forbidden in Vienna, and more recently it gave offence 
in Rome at a moment when popular feeling was excited 
as to the relations of Austria with the Balkan States. 
Now if a comedy so remote from political passion as 
Arms and The Man can, merely because it refers to po- 
litical facts, become so inconvenient and inopportune 
that Foreign Offices take the trouble to have its produc- 
tion postponed, what may not be the effect of what is 



36 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

called a patriotic drama produced at a moment when the 
balance is quivering between peace and war? Is there 
not something to be said for a political censorship, if 
not for a moral one? May not those continental govern- 
ments who leave the stage practically free in every other 
respect, but muzzle it politically, be justified by the 
practical exigencies of the situation? 

The Difference between Law and 
Censorship 

The answer is that a pamphlet, a newspaper article, or 
a resolution moved at a political meeting can do all the 
mischief that a play can, and often more; yet we do not 
set up a permanent censorship of the press or of political 
meetings. Any journalist may publish an article, any 
demagogue may deliver a speech without giving notice 
to the government or obtaining its licence. The risk of 
such freedom is great; but as it is the price of our po- 
litical liberty, we think it worth paying. We may abro- 
gate it in emergencies by a Coercion Act, a suspension 
of the Habeas Corpus Act, or a proclamation of martial 
law, just as we stop the traffic in a street during a fire, 
or shoot thieves at sight if they loot after an earthquake. 
But when the emergency is past, liberty is restored 
everywhere except in the theatre. The Act of 1843 is a 
permanent Coercion Act for the theatre, a permanent 
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act as far as plays are 
concerned, a permanent proclamation of martial law with 
a single official substituted for a court martial. It is, in 
fact, assumed that actors, playwrights, and theatre man- 
agers are dangerous and dissolute characters whose ex- 
istence creates a chronic state of emergency, and who 
must be treated as earthquake looters are treated. It is 
not necessary now to discredit this assumption. It was 
broken down by the late Sir Henry Irving when he 



The Rejected Statement 37 

finally shamed the Government into extending to his pro- 
fession the official recognition enjoyed by the other 
branches of fine art. To-day we have on the roll of 
knighthood actors, authors, and managers. The rogue 
and vagabond theory of the depravity of the theatre is 
as dead officially as it is in general society ; and with it 
has perished the sole excuse for the Act of 1843 and 
for the denial to the theatre of the liberties secured, at 
far greater social risk, to the press and the platform. 

There is no question here of giving the theatre any 
larger liberties than the press and the platform, or of 
claiming larger powers for Shakespear to eulogize Brutus 
than Lord Rosebery has to eulogize Cromwell. The 
abolition of the censorship does not involve the abolition 
of the magistrate and of the whole civil and criminal 
code. On the contrary it would make the theatre more 
effectually subject to them than it is at present; for once 
a play now runs the gauntlet of the censorship, it is 
practically placed above the law. It is almost humiliat- 
ing to have to demonstrate the essential difference be- 
tween a censor and a magistrate or a sanitary inspector; 
but it is impossible to ignore the carelessness with which 
even distinguished critics of the theatre assume that all 
the arguments proper to the support of a magistracy and 
body of jurisprudence apply equally to a censorship. 

A magistrate has laws to administer: a censor has 
nothing but his own opinion. A judge leaves the ques- 
tion of guilt to the jury: the Censor is jury and judge 
as well as lawgiver. A magistrate may be strongly 
prejudiced against an atheist or an anti -vaccinator, just 
as a sanitary inspector may have formed a careful opin- 
ion that drains are less healthy than cesspools ; but the 
magistrate must allow the atheist to affirm instead of 
to swear, and must grant the anti-vaccinator an exemp- 
tion certificate, when their demands are lawfully made; 
and in cities the inspector must compel the builder to 



38 The Sliewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

make drains and must prosecute him if he makes cess- 
pools. The law may be only the intolerance of the com- 
munity; but it is a defined and limited intolerance. The 
limitation is sometimes carried so far that a judge can- 
not inflict the penalty for housebreaking on a burglar 
who can prove that he found the door open and there- 
fore made only an unlawful entry. On the other hand, 
it is sometimes so vague, as for example in the case of 
the American law against obscenity, that it makes the 
magistrate virtually a censor. But in the main a citizen 
can ascertain what he may do and what he may not do; 
and, though no one knows better than a magistrate that 
a single ill-conducted family may demoralize a whole 
street, no magistrate can imprison or otherwise restrain 
its members on the ground that their immorality may 
corrupt their neighbors. He can prevent any citizen 
from carrying certain specified weapons, but not from 
handling pokers, table-knives, bricks or bottles of cor- 
rosive fluid, on the ground that he might use them to 
commit murder or inflict malicious injury. He has no 
general power to prevent citizens from selling unhealthy 
or poisonous substances, or judging for themselves what 
substances are unhealthy and what wholesome, what 
poisonous and what innocuous: what he can do is to 
prevent anybody who has not a specific qualification 
from selling certain specified poisons of which a sched- 
ule is kept. Nobody is forbidden to sell minerals with- 
out a licence; but everybody is forbidden to sell silver 
without a licence. When the law has forgotten some 
atrocious sin — for instance, contracting marriage whilst 
suffering from contagious disease — the magistrate can- 
not arrest or punish the wrongdoer, however he may 
abhor his wickedness. In short, no man is lawfully at 
the mercy of the magistrate's personal caprice, preju- 
dice, ignorance, superstition, temper, stupidity, resent- 
ment, timidity, ambition, or private conviction. But a 



The Rejected Statement 39 

playwright's livelihood, his reputation, and his inspira- 
tion and mission are at the personal mercy of the Censor. 
The two do not stand, as the criminal and the judge 
stand, in the presence of a law that binds them both 
equally, and was made by neither of them, but by the 
deliberative collective wisdom of the community;. The 
only law that affects them is the Act of ISiS, which em- 
powers one of them to do absolutely and finally what he 
likes with the other's work. And when it is remembered 
that the slave in this case is the man whose profession is 
that of Eschylus and Euripides, of Shakespear and 
Goethe, of Tolstoy and Ibsen, and the master the holder 
of a party appointment which by the nature of its duties 
practically excludes the possibility of its acceptance by 
a serious statesman or great lawyer, it will be seen that 
the playwrights are justified in reproaching the framers 
of that Act for having failed not only to appreciate the 
immense importance of the theatre as a most powerful 
instrument for teaching the nation how and what to 
think and feel, but even to conceive that those who make 
their living by the theatre are normal human beings with 
the common riglits of English citizens. In this extrem- 
ity of inconsiderateness it is not surprising that they also 
did not trouble themselves to study the difference be- 
tween a censor and a magistrate. And it will be found 
that almost all the people who disinterestedly defend 
the censorship today are defending him on the assump- 
tion that there is no constitutional difference between 
him and any other functionary whose duty it is to re- 
strain crime and disorder. 

One further difference remains to be noted. As a 
magistrate grows old his mind may change or decay; 
but the law remains the same. The censorship of the 
theatre fluctuates with every change in the views and 
character of the man who exercises it. And what this 
implies can only be appreciated by those who can imag- 



40 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

ine what the effect on the mind must be of the duty of 
reading through every play that is produced in the king- 
dom year in, year out. 

Why the Lord Chamberlain? 

What may be called the high political case against 
censorship as a principle is now complete. The plead- 
ings are those which have already freed books and pul- 
pits and political platforms in England from censor- 
ship, if not from occasional legal persecution. The stage 
alone remains under a censorship of a grotesquely un- 
suitable kind. No play can be performed if the Lord 
Chamberlain happens to disapprove of it. And the Lord 
Chamberlain's functions have no sort of relationship to 
dramatic literature. A great judge of literature, a far- 
seeing statesman, a born champion of liberty of con- 
science and intellectual integrity — say a Milton, a Ches- 
terfield, a Bentham — would be a very bad Lord Cham- 
berlain: so bad, in fact, that his exclusion from such a 
post may be regarded as decreed by natural law. On 
the other hand, a good Lord Chamberlain would be a 
stickler for morals in the narrowest sense, a busy-body, 
a man to whom a matter of two inches in the length of a 
gentleman's sword or the absence of a feather from a 
lady's head-dress would be a graver matter than the 
Habeas Corpus Act. The Lord Chamberlain, as Censor 
of the theatre, is a direct descendant of the King's Mas- 
ter of the Revels, appointed in 1544 by Henry VIIL to 
keep order among the players and musicians of that day 
when they performed at Court. This first appearance 
of the theatrical censor in politics as the whipper-in of 
the player, with its conception of the player as a rich 
man's servant hired to amuse hira, and, outside his pro- 
fessional duties, as a gay, disorderly, anarchic spoilt 
child, half privileged, half outlawed, probably as much 



The Rejected Statement 41 

vagabond as actor, is tlie real foundation of the subjec- 
tion of the whole profession, actors, managers, authors 
and all, to the despotic authority of an officer whose 
business it is to preserve decorum among menials. It 
must be remembered that it was not until a hundred 
years later, in the reaction against the Puritans, that a 
woman could appear on the English stage without being 
pelted off as the Italian actresses were. The theatrical 
profession was regarded as a shameless one; and it is 
only of late years that actresses have at last succeeded in 
living down the assumption that actress and prostitute are 
synonymous terms, and made good their position in re- 
spectable society. This makes the survival of the old 
ostracism in the Act of 1843 intolerably galling; and 
though it explains the apparently unaccountable absurd- 
ity of choosing as Censor of dramatic literature an offi- 
cial whose functions and qualifications have nothing 
whatever to do with literature, it also explains why the 
present arrangement is not only criticized as an institu- 
tion, but resented as an insult. 

The Diplomatic Objection to the Lord 
Chamberlain 

There is another reason, quite unconnected with the 
susceptibilities of autliors, whicji makes it undesirable 
that a member of the King's Household should be re- 
sponsible for the character and tendency of plays. The 
drama, dealing with all departments of human life, is 
necessarily political. Recent events have shown — what 
indeed needed no demonstration — that it is impossible 
to prevent inferences being made, both at home and 
abroad, from the action of the Lord Chamberlain. The 
most talked-about play of the present year (1909), An 
Englishman's Home, has for its main interest an inva- 
sion of England by a fictitious power which is under- 



42 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

stood, as it is meant to be vmderstood, to represent Ger- 
many. The lesson taught by the play is the danger of 
invasion and the need for every English citizen to be a 
soldier. The Lord Chamberlain licensed this play, but 
refused to license a parody of it. Shortly afterwards he 
refused to license another play in which the fear of a 
German invasion was ridiculed. The German press 
drew the inevitable inference that the Lord Chamberlain 
was an anti-German alarmist, and that his opinions were 
a reflection of those prevailing in St. James's Palace. 
Immediately after this, the Lord Chamberlain licensed 
the play. Whether the inference, as far as the Lord 
Chamberlain was concerned, was justified, is of no con- 
sequence. What is important is that it was sure to be 
made, justly or unjustly, and extended from the Lord 
Chamberlain to the Throne. 



The Objection of Court Etiquet 

There is another objection to the Lord Chamberlain's 
censorship which affects the author's choice of subject. 
Formerly very little heed was given in England to the 
susceptibilities of foreign courts. For instance, the no- 
tion that the Mikado of Japan should be as sacred to the 
English playwright as he is to the Japanese Lord Cham- 
berlain would have seemed grotesque a generation ago. 
Now that the maintenance of entente cordiale between 
nations is one of the most prominent and most useful 
functions of the crown, the freedom of authors to deal 
with political subjects, even historically, is seriously 
threatened by the way in which the censorship makes 
the King responsible for the contents of every play. 
One author — the writer of these lines, in fact — has long 
desired to dramatize the life of Mahomet. But the pos- 
sibility of a protest from the Turkish Ambassador — or 
the fear of it — causing the Lord Chamberlain to refuse 



The Rejected Statement 43 

to license such a play has prevented the play from being 
written. Now, if the censorship were abolished, nobody 
but the author could be held responsible for the play. 
The Turkish Ambassador does not now protest against 
the publication of Carlyle's essay on the prophet, or of 
the English translations of the Koran in the prefaces to 
which Mahomet is criticized as an impostor, or of the 
older books in which he is reviled as Mahovmd and 
classed with the devil himself. But if these publications 
had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain it would be 
impossible for the King to allow the licence to be issued, 
as he would thereby be made responsible for the opinions 
expressed. This restriction of the historical drama is an 
unmixed evil. Great religious leaders are more interest- 
ing and more important subjects for the dramatist than 
great conquerors. It is a misfortune that public opinion 
would not tolerate a dramatization of Mahomet in Con- 
stantinople. But to prohibit it here, where public opin- 
ion would tolerate it, is an absurdity which, if applied in 
all directions, would make it impossible for the Queen to 
receive a Turkish ambassador without veiling herself, 
or the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's to dis])lay a cross 
on the summit of their Cathedral in a city occupied 
largely and influentially by Jews. Court etiquet is no 
doubt an excellent thing for court ceremonies ; but 
to attempt to impose it on the drama is about as sensible 
as an attempt to make everybody in London wear court 
dress. 

Why not an Enlightened Censorship? 

In the above cases the general question of censorship 
is separable from the question of the present form of it. 
Every one who condemns the principle of censorship 
must also condemn the Lord Chamberlain's control of 
the drama; but those who approve of the principle do 



44 The Shewing-tJp of Blanco Posnet 

not necessarily approve of the Lord Chamberlain being 
the Censor ex officio. They may, however, be entirely 
opposed to pojDular liberties, and may conclude from 
what has been said, not that the stage should be made as 
free as the church, press, or platform, but that these in- 
stitutions should be censored as strictly as the stage. It 
will seem obvious to them that nothing is needed to re- 
move all objections to a censorship except the placing of 
its powers in better hands. 

Now though the transfer of the censorship to, say, 
the Lord Chancellor, or the Primate, or a Cabinet Min- 
ister, would be much less humiliating to the persons im- 
mediately concerned, the inherent vices of the institution 
would not be appreciably less disastrous. They would 
even be aggravated, for reasons which do not appear on 
the surface, and therefore need to be followed with some 
attention. 

It is often said that the public is the real censor. 
That this is to some extent true is proved by the fact 
that plays which are licensed and produced in London 
have to be expurgated for the provinces. This does not 
mean that the provinces are more strait-laced, but simply 
that in many provincial towns there is only one theatre 
for all classes and all tastes, whereas in London there 
are separate theatres for separate sections of playgoers; 
so that, for example, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree can 
conduct His ]\Lajesty's Theatre without the slightest re- 
gard to the tastes of the frequenters of the Gaiety The- 
atre; and Mr. George Edwardes can conduct the Gaiety 
Theatre without catering in any way for lovers of Shake- 
spear. Thus the farcical comedy which has scandalized 
the critics in London by the libertinage of its jests is 
played to the respectable dress circle of Northampton 
with these same jests slurred over so as to be imper- 
ceptible by even the most prurient spectator. The pub- 
lic, in short, takes care that nobody shall outrage it. 



The Rejected Statement 45 

But the public also takes care that nobody shall starve 
it, or regulate its dramatic diet as a schoolmistress regu- 
lates the reading of her pupils. Even when it wishes to 
be debauched, no censor can — or at least no censor does 
— stand out against it. If a play is irresistibly amusing, 
it gets licensed no matter wliat its moral aspect may be. 
A brilliant instance is the Divor9ons of the late Victorien 
Sardou, which may not have been the naughtiest play of 
the 19th century, but was certainly the very naughtiest 
that any English manager in his senses would have ven- 
tured to produce. Nevertheless, being a very amusing 
play, it passed the licenser with the exception of a ref- 
erence to impotence as a ground for divorce which no 
English actress would have ventured on in any case. 
Within tlie last few months a very amusing comedy with 
a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by 
the Lord Cliamberlain. Plenty of fun and a happy end- 
ing will get anything licensed, because the public will 
have it so, and the Examiner of Plays, as the holder of 
the office testified before the Commission of 1892 (Re- 
port, page 330), feels with the public, and knows that his 
office could not survive a widespread unpopularity. In 
short, the support of the mob — that is, of the unreason- 
ing, unorganized, uninstructed mass of popular senti- 
ment — is indispensable to the censorship as it exists to- 
day in England. This is the explanation of the tol- 
eration by the Lord Chamberlain of coarse and vicious 
plajj^s. It is not long since a judge before whom a 
licensed play came in the course of a lawsuit expressed 
his scandalized astonishment at tlie licensing of such a 
work. Eminent churchmen have made similar protests. 
In some plays the simulation of criminal assaults on the 
stage has been carried to a point at which a step further 
would have involved the interference of the police. Pro- 
vided the treatment of the theme is gaily or hypocrit- 
ically popular, and the ending happy, the indulgence of 



46 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

the Lord Chamberlain can be counted on. On the other 
hand, anything iinpleasing and unpopular is rigorously 
censored. Adultery and prostitution are tolerated and 
even encouraged to such an extent that plays which do 
not deal with them are commonly said not to be plays 
at all. But if any of the unpleasing consequences of 
adultery and prostitution — for instance, an unsuccessful 
illegal operation (successful ones are tolerated) or vene- 
real disease — are mentioned, the play is prohibited. 
This principle of shielding the playgoer from impleas- 
ant reflections is carried so far that when a play was sub- 
mitted for license in which the relations of a prostitute 
with all the male characters in the piece was described 
as " immoral," the Examiner of Plays objected to that 
passage, though he made no objection to the relations 
themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, 
attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of mur- 
der and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and 
dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight. But 
when these same vulgar people are threatened with an 
unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no 
laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar 
applause, the net result being that vice is made delight- 
ful and virtue banned by the very institution which is 
supported on the understanding that it produces exactly 
the opposite result. 

The Weakness of the Lord Chamberlain's 
Department 

Now comes the question. Why is our censorship, 
armed as it is with apparently autocratic powers, so 
scandalously timid in the face of the mob.'' Why is it 
not as autocratic in dealing with playwrights below the 
average as with those above it.'' The answer is that its 
position is really a very weak one. It has no direct co- 



The Rejected Statement 47 

ercive forces, no funds to institute prosecutions and re- 
cover the legal penalties of defying it, no powers of ar- 
rest or imprisonment, in short, none of the guarantees 
of autocracy. What it can do is to refuse to renew the 
licence of a theatre at which its orders are disobeyed. 
When it happens that a theatre is about to be demol- 
ished, as was the case recently with the Imperial Theatre 
after it had passed into the hands of the Wesleyan Meth- 
odists, unlicensed plays can be performed, technically 
in private, but really in full publicity, without risk. 
The prohibited plays of Brieux and Ibsen have been 
performed in London in this way with complete impun- 
ity. But the impunity is not confined to condemned the- 
atres. Not long ago a West End manager allowed a 
prohibited play to be performed at his theatre, taking 
his chance of losing his licence in consequence. The 
event proved that the manager was justified in regarding 
the risk as negligible; for the Lord Chamberlain's rem- 
edy — the closing of a popular and well-conducted the- 
atre — was far too extreme to be practicable. Unless 
the play had so outraged public opinion as to make the 
manager odious and provoke a clamor for his exemplary 
punishment, the Lord Chamberlain could only have had 
his revenge at the risk of having his powers abolished as 
unsupportably tyrannical. 

The Lord Chamberlain then has his powers so adjusted 
that he is tyrannical just where it is important that he 
should be tolerant, and tolerant just where he could 
screw up the standard a little by being tyrannical. His 
plea that there are unmentionable depths to which man- 
agers and authors would descend if he did not prevent 
them is disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence 
goes as far as the police, and sometimes further than 
the public, will let it. If our judges had so little power 
there would be no law in England. If our churches had 
so much, there would be no theatre, no literature, no 



48 The Shewlng-Up of Blanco Posnet 

science, no art, possibly no England. The institution 
is at once absurdly despotic and abjectly weak. 



An Enlightened Censorship still worse 
than the Lord Chamberlain's 

Clearly a censorship of judges, bishops, or statesmen 
would not be in this abject condition. It would no doubt 
make short work of the coarse and vicious pieces which 
now enjoy the protection of the Lord Chamberlain, or at 
least of those of them in which the vulgarity and vice 
are discoverable by merely reading the prompt copy. 
But it would certainly disappoint the main hope of its 
advocates: the hope that it would protect and foster the 
higher drama. It would do nothing of the sort. On 
the contrary, it would inevitably suppress it more com- 
pletely than the Lord Chamberlain does, because it 
would understand it better. The one play of Ibsen's 
which is prohibited on the English stage. Ghosts, is far 
less subversive than A Doll's House. But the Lord 
Chamberlain does not meddle with such far-reaching 
matters as the tendency of a play. He refuses to license 
Ghosts exactly as he would refuse to license Hamlet 
if it were submitted to him as a new play. He would 
license even Hamlet if certain alterations were made in 
it. He would disallow the incestuous relationship be- 
tween the King and Queen. He would probably insist 
on the substitution of some fictitious country for Den- 
mark in deference to the near relations of our reign- 
ing house with that realm. He would certainly make 
it an absolute condition that the closet scene, in which 
a son, in an agony of shame and revulsion, reproaches 
his mother for her relations with his uncle, should be 
struck out as unbearably horrifying and improper. But 
compliance with these conditions would satisfy him. He 



The Rejected Statement 49 

would raise no speculative objections to the tendency of 
the play. 

This indifference to the larger issues of a theatrical 
performance could not be safely predicated of an en- 
lightened censorship. Such a censorship might be more 
liberal in its toleration of matters which are only ob- 
jected to on the ground that they are not usually dis- 
cussed in general social conversation or in the presence 
of children ; but it would presumably have a far deeper 
insight to and concern for the real ethical tendency of 
the play. For instance, had it been in existence during 
the last quarter of a century, it would have perceived 
that those plays of Ibsen's which have been licensed 
without question are fundamentally immoral to an alto- 
gether extraordinary degree. Every one of them is a 
deliberate act of war on society as at present consti- 
tuted. Religion, marriage, ordinary respectability, are 
subjected to a destructive exposure and criticism which 
seems to mere moralists — that is, to persons of no more 
than average depth of mind — to be diabolical. It is no 
exaggeration to say that Ibsen gained his overwhelming 
reputation by undertaking a task of no less magnitude 
than changing the mind of Europe with the view of 
changing its morals. Now you cannot license work of 
that sort without making yourself responsible for it. 
The Lord Chamberlain accepted the responsibility be- 
cause he did not understand it or concern himself about 
it. But what really enlightened and conscientious official 
dare take such a responsibility? The strength of char- 
acter and range of vision which made Ibsen capable of 
it are not to be expected from any official, however emi- 
nent. It is true that an enlightened censor might, whilst 
shrinking even with horror from Ibsen's views, perceive 
that any nation which suppressed Ibsen would presently 
find itself falling behind the nations which tolerated him 
just as Spain fell behind England; but the proper action 



50 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

to take on such a conviction is the abdication of censor- 
ship, not the practise of it. As long as a censor is » 
censor, he cannot endorse by his licence opinions which 
seem to him dangerously heretical. 

We may, therefore, conclude that the more enlightened 
a censorship is, the worse it would serve us. The Lord 
Chamberlain, an obviously unenlightened Censor, pro- 
hibits Ghosts and licenses all the rest of Ibsen's plays. 
An enlightened censorship would possibly license Ghosts ; 
but it would certainly suppress many of the other plays. 
It would suppress subversiveness as well as what is 
called bad taste. The Lord Chamberlain prohibits one 
play by Sophocles because, like Hamlet, it mentions the 
subject of incest; but an enlightened censorship might 
suppress all tlie plaj's of Euripides because Euripides, 
like Ibsen, was a revolutionary Freethinker. Under the 
Lord Chamberlain, we can smuggle a good deal of im- 
moral drama and almost as much coarsely vulgar and 
furtively lascivious drama as we like. Under a college 
of cardinals, or bisliops, or judges, or any other con- 
ceivable form of experts in morals, philosophy, religion, 
or politics, we should get little except stagnant medi- 
ocrity. 

The Practical Impossibilities of 
Censorship 

There is, besides, a crushing material difficulty in the 
"way of an enlightened censorship. It is not too much 
to say that the work involved would drive a man of 
any intellectual rank mad. Consider, for example, the 
Christmas pantomimes. Imagine a judge of the High 
Court, or an archbishop, or a Cabinet Minister, or an 
eminent man of letters, earning his living by reading 
through the mass of trivial doggerel represented by all 
the pantomimes which are put into rehearsal simultane- 
ously at the end of every year. The proposal to put 



The Rejected Statement 51 

such mind-destro3'ing drudgery upon an official of the 
class implied by the demand for an enlightened censor- 
ship falls through the moment we realize what it implies 
in practice. 

Another material difficulty is that no play can be 
judged by merely reading the dialogue. To be fully 
effective a censor should witness the performance. The 
mise-en-scene of a play is as much a part of it as the 
words spoken on the stage. No censor could possibly 
object to such a speech as " Might I speak to you for 
a moment, miss " ; yet that apparently innocent jihrase 
has often been made offensively improper on the stage 
by popular low comedians, with the effect of changing 
the whole character and meaning of the play as under- 
stood by the official Examiner. In one of the plays of 
the present season, the dialogue was that of a crude 
melodrama dealing in the most conventionally correct 
manner with the fortunes of a good-hearted and virtu- 
ous girl. Its morality was that of the Sunday school. 
But the principal actress, between two sjjeeches which 
contained no reference to her action, changed lier under- 
clothing on the stage? It is true that in this case the 
actress was so much better than her part that she suc- 
ceeded in turning what was meant as an impropriety into 
an inoffensive stroke of realism ; yet it is none the less 
clear that stage business of this character, on which 
there can be no check except the actual presence of a 
censor in the theatre, might convert any dialogue, how- 
ever innocent, into just the sort of entertainment against 
which the Censor is supposed to protect the public. 

It was this practical impossibility that prevented the 
London County Council from attempting to apply a cen- 
sorship of the Lord Chamberlain's pattern to the Lon- 
don music halls. A proposal to examine all entertain- 
ments before permitting their performance was actually 
made; and it was abandoned, not in the least as contrary 



52 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

to the liberty of the stage, but because the executive 
problem of how to do it at once reduced the proposal to 
absurdity. Even if the Council devoted all its time to 
witnessing rehearsals of variety performances, and put- 
ting each item to the vote, possibly after a prolonged 
discussion followed by a division, the work would still 
fall into arrear. No committee could be induced to un- 
dertake such a task. The attachment of an inspector of 
morals to each music hall would have meant an appre- 
ciable addition to the ratepayers' burden. In the face 
of such difficulties the proposal melted away. Had it 
been pushed through, and the inspectors appointed, each 
of them would have become a censor, and the whole body 
of inspectors would have become a police des moeurs. 
Those who know the history of such pol'ce forces on the 
continent will understand how impossible it would be 
to procure inspectors whose characters would stand the 
strain of their opportunities of corruption, both pecu- 
niary and personal, at such salaries as a local authority 
could be persuaded to offer. 

It has been suggested that the present censorship 
should be supplemented by a board of experts, who 
should deal, not with the whole mass of plays sent up 
for license, but only those which the Examiner of Plays 
refuses to pass. As the number of plays which the Ex- 
aminer refuses to pass is never great enough to occupy 
a Board in permanent session with regular salaries, and 
as casual employment is not compatible with public re- 
sponsibility, this proposal would work out in practice as 
an addition to the duties of some existing functionary. 
A Secretary of State would be objectionable as likely to 
be biased politically. An ecclesiastical referee might be 
biassed against the theatre altogether. A judge in cham- 
bers would be the proper authority. This plan would 
combine the inevitable intolerance of an enlightened cen- 
sorship with the popular laxity of the Lord Chamberlain. 



The Rejected Statement 53 

The judge would suppress the pioneers, whilst the Ex- 
aminer of Plays issued two guinea certificates for the 
vulgar and vicious plays. For this reason the plan 
would no doubt be popular; but it would be very much 
as a relaxation of the administration of the Public 
Health Acts accompanied by the cheapening of gin 
would be popular. 

The Arbitration Proposal 

On the occasion of a recent deputation of playwrights 
to the Prime Minister it was suggested that if a cen- 
sorship be inevitable, provision should be made for an 
appeal from the Lord Chamberlain in cases of refusal of 
licence. The authors of this suggestion propose that the 
Lord Chamberlain shall choose one umpire and the au- 
thor another. The two umpires shall then elect a ref- 
eree, whose decision shall be final. 

This proposal is not likely to be entertained by con- 
stitutional lawyers. It is a naive offer to accept the 
method of arbitration in what is essentially a matter, not 
between one private individual or body and another, but 
between a public offender and the State. It will presum- 
ably be ruled out as a proposal to refer a case of man- 
slaughter to arbitration would be ruled out. But even 
if it were constitutionally sound, it bears all the marks 
of that practical inexperience which leads men to believe 
that arbitration either costs nothing or is at least cheaper 
than law. Who is to pay for the time of the three arbi- 
trators, presumably men of high professional standing? 
The author may not be able: the manager may not be 
willing: neither of them should be called upon to pay 
for a public service otherwise than by their contributions 
to the revenue. Clearly the State should pay. But even 
so, the difficulties are only beginning. A licence is sel- 
dom refused except on grounds which are controversiaL 



54 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

The two arbitrators selected by the opposed parties to 
the controversy are to agree to leave the decision to a 
third party unanimously chosen by themselves. That is 
very far from being a simple solution. An attempt to 
shorten and simplify the passing of the Finance Bill by 
referring it to an arbitrator chosen unanimously by Mr. 
Asquith and Mr. Balfour might not improbably cost 
more and last longer than a civil war. And why should 
the chosen referee — if he ever succeeded in getting 
chosen — be assumed to be a safer authority than the 
Examiner of Plays.'' He would certainly be a less re- 
sponsible one: in fact, being (however eminent) a casual 
person called in to settle a single case, he would be vir- 
tually irresponsible. Worse still, he would take all re- 
sponsibility away from the Lord Chamberlain, who is at 
least an official of the King's Household and a nominee 
of the Government. The Lord Chamberlain, with all his 
shortcomings, thinks twice before he refuses a licence, 
knowing that his refusal is final and may promptly be 
made public. But if he could transfer his responsibility 
to an arbitrator, he would naturally do so whenever he 
felt the slightest misgiving, or whenever, for diplomatic 
reasons, the licence would come more gracefully from an 
authority imconnected with the court. These considera- 
tions, added to the general objection to the principle of 
censorship, seem sufficient to put the arbitration expedi- 
ent quite out of the question. 



End of the First Part of The Rejected Statement. 



THE REJECTED STATEMENT 

Part II 

THE LICENSING OF THEATRES 

The Distinction between Licensing and 
Censorship 

It must not be concluded that the uncompromising aboli- 
tion of all censorship involves the abandonment of all 
control and regulation of theatres. Factories are regu- 
lated in the public interest ; but there is no censorship of 
factories. For example, many persons are sincerely con- 
vinced that cotton clothing is unhealthy; that alcoholic 
drinks are demoralizing; and that playing-cards are the 
devil's picture-books. But though the factories in which 
cotton, whiskey, and cards are manufactured are strin- 
gently regulated under the factory code and the Public 
Health and Building Acts, the inspectors appointed to 
carry out these Acts never go to a manufacturer and in- 
form him that unless he manufactures woollens instead 
of cottons, ginger-beer instead of whiskey. Bibles instead 
of playing-cards, he will be forbidden to place his prod- 
ucts on the market. In the case of premises licensed 
for the sale of spirits the authorities go a step further. 
A public-house differs from a factory in the essential 
particular that whereas disorder in a factory is promptly 
and voluntarily suppressed, because every moment of its 
duration involves a measurable pecuniary loss to the pro- 
prietor, disorder in a public-house may be a source of 
profit to the proprietor by its attraction for disorderly 
customers. Consequently a publican is compelled to ob- 
tain a licence to pursue his trade; and this licence lasts 



56 The She wing- tip of Blanco Posnet 

only a year, and need not be renewed if his house has 
been conducted in a disorderly manner in the meantime. 

Prostitution and Drink in Theatres 

The theatre presents the same problem as the public- 
house in respect to disorder. To begin with, a theatre is 
actually a place licensed for the sale of spirits. The 
bars at a London theatre can be let without difficulty for 
,£30 a week and upwards. And though it is clear that 
nobody will pay from a shilling to half a guinea for 
access to a theatre bar when he can obtain access to an 
ordinary public-house for nothing, there is no law to 
prevent the theatre proprietor from issuing free passes 
broadcast and recouping himself by the profit on the 
sale of drink. Besides, there may be some other attrac- 
tion than the sale of drink. When this attraction is that 
of the play no objection need be made. But it happens 
that the auditorium of a theatre, with its brilliant light- 
ing and luxurious decorations, makes a very effective 
shelter and background for the display of fine dresses 
and pretty faces. Consequently theatres have been used 
for centuries in England as markets by prostitutes. 
From the Restoration to the days of Macready all the- 
atres were made use of in this way as a matter of course ; 
and to this, far more than to any prejudice against 
dramatic art, we owe the Puritan formula that the theatre 
dooj" is the gate of hell. Macready had a hard struggle 
to drive the prostitutes from his theatre; and since his 
time the London theatres controlled by the Lord Cham- 
berlain have become respectable and even socially pre- 
tentious. But some of the variety theatres still derive a 
revenue by selling admissions to women who do not look 
at the performance, and men who go to purchase or 
admire the women. And in the provinces this state of 
things is by no means confined to the variety theatres. 



The Rejected Statement 57 

The real attraction is sometimes not the performance at 
all. The theatre is not really a theatre: it is a drink 
shop and a prostitution market; and the last shred of its 
disguise is stripped by the virtually indiscriminate issue 
of free tickets to the men. Access to the stage is so 
easily obtained; and the plays preferred by the man- 
agement are those in which the stage is filled with young 
women who are not in any serious technical sense of the 
word actresses at all. Considering that all this is now 
possible at any theatre, and actually occurs at some the- 
atres, the fact that our best theatres are as respectable 
as they are is much to their credit; but it is still an 
intolerable evil that respectable managers should have to 
fight against the free tickets and disorderly housekeep- 
ing of unscrupulous competitors. The dramatic author 
is equally injured. He finds that unless he writes plays 
which make suitable sideshows for drinking-bars and 
brothels, he may be excluded from towns where there 
is not room for two theatres, and where the one exist- 
ing theatre is exploiting drunkenness and prostitution 
instead of carrying on a legitimate dramatic business. 
Indeed everybody connected with the theatrical profes- 
sion suffers in reputation from the detestable tradition of 
such places, against which the censorship has proved 
quite useless. 

Here we have a strong case for applying either the 
licensing system or whatever better means may be de- 
vized for securing the orderly conduct of houses of 
public entertainment, dramatic or other. Liberty must, 
no doubt, be respected in so far that no manager should 
have the right to refuse admission to decently dressed, 
sober, and well-conducted persons, whether they are 
prostitutes, soldiers in uniform, gentlemen not in evening 
dress, Indians, or what not; but when disorder is 
stopped, disorderly persons will either cease to come or 
else reform their manners. It is, however, quite argu- 



58 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

able that the indiscriminate issue of free admissions, 
though an apparently innocent and good-natured, and 
certainly a highly popular proceeding, should expose the 
proprietor of the theatre to the risk of a refusal to renew 
his licence. 

Why the Managers dread Local Control 

All this points to the transfer of the control of the- 
atres from the Lord Chamberlain to the municipality. 
And this step is opposed by the long-run managers, 
partly because they take it for granted that municipal 
control must involve municipal censorship of plays, so 
that plays might be licensed in one town and prohibited 
in the next, and partly because, as they have no desire 
to produce plays which are in advance of public opinion, 
and as the Lord Chamberlain in every other respect 
gives more scandal by his laxity than trouble by his 
severity, they find in the present system a cheap and 
easy means of procuring a certificate which relieves them 
of all social responsibility, and provides them with go 
strong a weapon of defence in case of a prosecution that 
it acts in practice as a bar to any such proceedings. 
Above all, they know that the Examiner of Plays is free 
from the pressure of that large body of English public 
opinion already alluded to, which regards the theatre as 
the Prohibitionist Teetotaller regards the public-house: 
that is, as an abomination to be stamped out uncondi- 
tionally. The managers rightly dread this pressure 
more than anything else; and they believe that it is so 
strong in local governments as to be a characteristic bias 
of municipal authority." In this they are no doubt mis- 
taken. There is not a municipal authority of any im- 
portance in the country in which a proposal to stamp 
out the theatre, or even to treat it illiberally, would have 
a chance of adoption. Municipal control of the variety 



The Rejected Statement 59 

theatres (formerly called music halls) has been very 
far from liberal, except in the one particular in which 
the Lord Chamberlain is equally illiberal. That par- 
ticular is the assumption that a draped figure is decent 
and an undraped one indecent. It is useless to point to 
actual experience, which proves abundantly that naked 
or apparently naked figures, whether exhibited as living 
pictures, animated statuary, or in a dance, are at their 
best not only innocent, but refining in their effect, where- 
as those actresses and skirt dancers who have brought 
the peculiar aphrodisiac effect which is objected to to 
the highest pitch of efficiency wear twice as many petti- 
coats as an ordinary lady does, and seldom exhibit more 
than their ankles. Unfortunately, municipal councillors 
persist in confusing decency with drapery ; and both in 
London and the provinces certain positively edifying 
performances have been forbidden or withdrawn under 
pressure, and replaced by coarse and vicious ones. 
There is not the slightest reason to suppose that the 
Lord Chamberlain would have been any more tolerant; 
but this does not alter the fact that the municipal licens- 
ing authorities have actually used their powers to set up 
a censorship which is open to all the objections to cen- 
sorship in general, and which, in addition, sets up the 
objection from which central control is free: namely, the 
impossibility of planning theatrical tours without the 
serious commercial risk of having the performance for- 
bidden in some of the towns booked. How can this be 
prevented .'' 

Desirable Limitations of Local Control 

The problem is not a difficult one. The municipality 
can be limited just as the monarchy is limited. The Act 
transferring theatres to local control can be a charter 
of the liberties of the stage as well as an Act to reform 



60 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

administration. The power to refuse to grant or renew 
a licence to a theatre need not be an arbitrary one. The 
municipality may be required to state the ground of re- 
fusal; and certain grounds can be expressly declared 
as unlawful; so that it shall be possible for the manager 
to resort to the courts for a mandamus to compel the 
authority to grant a licence. It can be declared unlaw- 
ful for a licensing authority to demand from the man- 
ager any disclosure of the nature of any entertainment 
he proposes to give, or to prevent its performance, or to 
refuse to renew his licence on the ground that the tend- 
ency of his entertainments is contrary to religion and 
morals, ar that the theatre is an undesirable institution, 
or that there are already as many theatres as are needed, 
or that the theatre draws people away from the churches, 
chapels, mission halls, and the like in its neighborhood. 
The assumption should be that every citizen has a right 
to open and conduct a theatre, and therefore has a right 
to a licence unless he has forfeited that right by allow- 
ing his theatre to become a disorderly house, or failing 
to provide a building which complies with the regula- 
tions concerning sanitation and egress in case of fire, 
or being convicted of an offence against public decency. 
Also, the licensing powers of the authority should not 
be delegated to any official or committee; and the man- 
ager or lessee of the theatre should have a right to ap- 
pear in person or by counsel to plead against any motion 
to refuse to grant or renew his licence. With these safe- 
guards the licensing power could not be stretched to cen- 
sorship. The manager would enjoy liberty of conscience 
as far as the local authority is concerned; but on the 
least attempt on his part to keep a disorderly house 
under cover of opening a theatre he would risk his 
licence. 

But the managers will not and should not be satisfied 
with these limits to the municipal power. If they are 



The Rejected Statement 61" 

deprived of the protection of the Lord Chamberlain's 
licence, and at the same time efficiently protected against 
every attempt at censorship by the licensing authority, 
the enemies of the theatre will resort to the ordinary 
law, and try to get from tlie prejudices of a jury what 
they are debarred from getting from the prejudices of 
a County Council or City Corporation. Moral Reform 
Societies, " Purity " Societies, Vigilance Societies, exist 
in England and America for the purpose of enforcing 
the existing laws against obscenity, blasphemy. Sabbath- 
breaking, the debauchery of children, prostitution and so 
forth. The paid officials of these societies, in their 
anxiety to produce plenty of evidence of their activity 
in the annual reports which go out to the subscribers, do 
not always discriminate between an obscene postcard and 
an artistic one, or to put it more exactly, between a 
naked figure and an indecent one. They often combine 
a narrow but terribly sincere sectarian bigotry with a 
complete ignorance of art and history. Even when they 
have some culture, their livelihood is at the mercy of 
subscribers and committee men who have none. If these 
officials had any power of distinguishing between art and 
blackguardism, between morality and virtue, between im- 
morality and vice, between conscientious heresy and mere 
baseness of mind and foulness of mouth, they might be 
trusted by theatrical managers not to abuse the pow- 
ers of the common informer. As it is, it has been found 
necessary, in order to enable good music to be perfonmed 
on Sunday, to take away these powers in that particular, 
and vest them solely in the Attorney-General. This 
disqualification of the common informer should be ex- 
tended to the initiation of all proceedings of a censorial 
character against theatres. Few people are aware of the 
monstrous laws against blasphemy which still disgrace 
our statute book. If any serious attempt were made to 
carry them out, prison accommodation would have to be 



62 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

provided for almost every educated person in the coun- 
try, beginning with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Un- 
til some government with courage and character enough 
to repeal them comes into power, it is not too much to 
ask that such infamous powers of oppression should be 
kept in responsible hands and not left at the disposal 
of every bigot ignorant enough to be unaware of the 
social dangers of persecution. Besides, the common in- 
former is not always a sincere bigot, who believes he is 
performing an action of signal merit in silencing and 
ruining a heretic. He is unfortunately just as often a 
blackmailer, who has studied his powers as a common 
informer in order that he may extort money for refrain- 
ing from exercising them. If the manager is to be re- 
sponsible he should be made responsible to a responsi- 
ble functionary. To be responsible to every fanatical 
ignoramus who chooses to prosecute him for exhibiting a 
cast of the Hermes of Praxiteles in his vestibule, or giv- 
ing a performance of Measure for Measure, is mere slav- 
ery. It is made bearable at present by the protection 
of the Lord Chamberlain's certificate. But when that is 
no longer available, the common informer must be dis- 
armed if the manager is to enjoy security. 



SUMMARY 



The general case against censorship as a principle, 
and the particular case against the existing English cen- 
sorship and against its replacement by a more enlight- 
ened one, is now complete. The following is a recapitu- 
lation of the propositions and conclusions contended for. 

1. The question of censorship or no censorship is a 
question of high political principle and not of petty 
policy. 

2. The toleration of heresy and shocks to morality on 
the stage, and even their protection against the preju- 
dices and superstitions which necessarily enter largely 
into morality and public opinion, are essential to the 
welfare of the nation. 

3. The existing censorship of the Lord Chamberlain 
does not only intentionally suppress heresy and chal- 
lenges to morality in their serious and avowed forms, but 
unintentionally gives the special protection of its official 
licence to the most extreme impropriety that the lowest 
section of London playgoers v/ill tolerate in theatres es- 
pecially devoted to their entertainment, licensing every- 
thing that is popular and forbidding any attempt to 
change public opinion or morals. 

4. The Lord Chamberlain's censorship is open to the 
special objection tliat its application to political plays is 
taken to indicate tlie attitude of the Crown on questions 
of domestic and foreign policy, and that it imposes the 
limits of etiqnet on the historical drama. 

5. A censorship of a more enlightened and independ- 



64 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

ent kind, exercised by the most eminent available author- 
ities, would prove in practice more disastrous than the 
censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, because the more 
eminent its members were the less possible it would be 
for them to accept the responsibility for heresy or im- 
morality by licensing them, and because the many heret- 
ical and immoral plays which now pass the Lord Cham- 
berlain because he does not understand them, would be 
understood and suppressed by a more highly enlightened 
censorship. 

6. A reconstructed and enlightened censorship would 
be armed with summary and effective powers which 
would stop the evasions by which heretical and immoral 
plays are now performed in spite of the Lord Chamber- 
lain; and such powers would constitute a tyranny w^ich 
would ruin the theatre spiritually by driving all inde- 
pendent thinkers from the drama into the uncensored 
forms of art. 

7. The work of critically examining all stage plays 
in their written form, and of witnessing their perform- 
ance in order to see that the sense is not altered by 
the stage business, would, even if it were divided 
among so many officials as to be physically possible, 
be mentally impossible to persons of taste and en- 
lightenment. 

8. Regulation of theatres is an entirely different mat- 
ter from censorship, inasmuch as a theatre, being not 
only a stage, but a place licensed for the sale of spirits, 
and a public resort capable of being put to disorderly 
use, and needing special provision for the safety of au- 
diences in cases of fire, etc., cannot be abandoned wholly 
to private control, and may therefore reasonably be made 
subject to an annual licence like those now required be- 
fore allowing premises to be used publicly for music and 
dancing. 

9. In order to prevent the powers of the licensing au- 



The Rejected Statement 65 

thority being abused so as to constitute a virtual cen- 
sorship, any Act transferring the theatres to the control 
of a licensing authority should be made also a charter 
of the rights of dramatic authors and managers by the 
following provisions : 

A. The public prosecutor (the Attorney-General) 
alone should have the right to set the law in operation 
against the manager of a theatre or the author of a 
play in respect of the character of the play or enter- 
tainment. 

B. No disclosure of the particulars of a theatrical en- 
tertainment shall be required before performance. 

C. Licences shall not be withheld on the ground that 
the existence of theatres is dangerous to religion and 
morals, or on the ground that any entertainment given 
or contemplated is heretical or immoral. 

D. The licensing area shall be no less than that of a 
County Council or City Corporation, which shall not del- 
egate its licensing powers to any minor local authority 
or to any official or committee; it shall decide all ques- 
tions affecting the existence of a theatrical licence by 
vote of the entire body; managers, lessees, and proprie- 
tors of theatres shall have the right to plead, in person 
or by counsel, against a proposal to withhold a licence; 
and ilie licence shall not be withheld except for stated 
reasons, the validity of which shall be subject to the 
judgment of the high courts. 

E. The annual licence, once granted, shall not be can- 
celled or suspended unless the manager has been con- 
victed by public prosecution of an offence against the 
ordinary laws against disorderly housekeeping, inde- 
cency, blasphemy, etc., except in cases where some 
structural or sanitary defect in the building necessitates 
immediate action for the protection of the public against 
physical injury. 

F. No licence shall be refused on the ground that 



66 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

the proximity of the theatre to a church, mission hall, 
school, or other place of worship, edification, instruc- 
tion, or entertainment (including another theatre) would 
draw the public away from such places into its own 
doors. 



PREFACE RESUMED 



Mr. George Alexander's Protest 

On the facts mentioned in the foreffoing statement, and 
in my evidence before the Joint Select Committee, no 
controversy arose except on one point. Mr. George 
Alexander protested vigorously and indignantly against 
my admission that theatres, like public-houses, need spe- 
cial control on the ground that they can profit by dis- 
order, and are sometimes conducted with that end in 
view. Now, Mr. Alexander is a famous actor-manager; 
and it is very difficult to persuade the public that the 
more famous an actor-manager is the less he is likely 
to know about any theatre except his own. When the 
Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered guilty of 
a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who 
knew least about the theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a 
moment's consideration would have shown that the para- 
dox was a platitude. For about quarter of a century 
Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre 
and his OAvn dressing-room, never seeing a play even 
there because he was himself part of the play ; producing 
the works of long-departed authors ; and, to the extent 
to which his talent was extraordinary, necessarily mak- 
ing his theatre unlike any other theatre. When he went 
to the provinces or to America, the theatres to which he 
went were swept and garnished for him, and their staffs 
replaced — as far as he came in contact with them — by 
his own lieutenants. In the endj there was hardly a 



68 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

first-nighter in his gallery who did not know more about 
the London theatres and the progress of dramatic art 
than he; and as to the provinces, if any chief constable 
had told him the real history and character of many 
provincial theatres, he would have denounced that chief 
constable as an ignorant libeller of a noble profession. 
But the constable would have been right for all that. 
Now if this was true of Sir Henry Irving, who did not 
become a London manager until he had roughed it for 
years in the provinces, how much more true must it be 
of, say, Mr. George Alexander, whose successful march 
through his profession has passed as far from the pur- 
lieus of our theatrical world as the king's naval career 
from the Isle of Dogs ? The moment we come to that 
necessary part of the censorship question which deals 
with the control of theatres from the point of view of 
those who know how much money can be made out of 
them by managers who seek to make the auditorium at- 
tractive rather than the stage, you find the managers 
divided into two sections. The first section consists of 
honorable and successful managers like Mr. Alexander, 
who know nothing of such abuses, and deny, with per- 
fect sincerity and indignant vehemence, thai; they exist 
except, perhaps, in certain notorious variety theatres. 
The other is the silent section which knows better, but 
is very well content to be publicly defended and pri- 
vately amused by Mr. Alexander's innocence. To accept 
a West End manager as an expert in theatres because he 
is an actor is much as if we were to accept the organist 
of St. Paul's Cathedral as an expert on music halls be- 
cause he is a musician. The real experts are all in the 
conspiracy to keep the police out of the theatre. And 
they are so successful that even the police do not know 
as much as they should. 

The police should have been examined by the Com- 
mittee, and the whole question of the extent to which 



Preface 69 

theatres are disorderly houses in disguise sifted to the 
bottom. For it is on this point that we discover behind 
the phantoms of the corrupt dramatists who are re- 
strained by the censorship from debauching the stage, the 
reality of the corrupt managers and theatre proprietors 
who actually do debauch it without let or hindrance from 
the censorship. The whole case for giving control over 
theatres to local authorities rests on this reality. 

Eliza and Her Bath 

The persistent notion that a theatre is an Alsatia 
where the king's writ does not run, and whiere any wick- 
edness is possible in the absence of a special tribunal 
and a special police, was brought out by an innocent re- 
mark made by Sir William Gilbert, who, when giving 
evidence before the Committee, was asked by Colonel 
Lockwodcl whether a law sufficient to restrain impropri- 
ety in books would also restrain impropriety in plays. 
Sir William replied : " I should say there is a very wide 
distinction between what is read and what is seen. In a 
novel one may read that ' Eliza stripped off her dress- 
ing-gown and stepped into her bath ' without any harm ; 
but I think if that were presented on the stage it would 
be shocking." All the stupid and inconsiderate people 
seized eagerly on this illustration as if it were a suc- 
cessful attempt to prove that without a censorship we 
should be unable to prevent actresses from appearing 
naked on the stage. As a matter of fact, if an actress 
could be persuaded to do such a thing (and it would be 
about as easy to persuade a bishop's wife to appear in 
church in the same condition) the police would simply 
arrest her on a charge of indecent exposure. The extent 
to which this obvious safeguard was overlooked maj'^ be 
taken as a measure of the thoughtlessness and frivolity 
of the excuses made for the censorship. It should be 



70 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

added that the artistic representation of a bath, with 
every suggestion of nakedness that the law as to decency 
allows, is one of the most familiar subjects of scenic art. 
From the Rhine maidens in Wagner's Trilogy, and the 
bathers in the second act of Les Huguenots, to the bal- 
lets of water nymphs in our Christmas pantomimes and 
at our variety theatres, the sound hygienic propaganda 
of the bath, and the charm of the undraped human fig- 
ure, are exploited without offence on the stage to an 
extent never dreamt of by any novelist. 

A King's Proctor 

Another hare was started by Professor Gilbert Mur- 
ray and Mr. Laurence Housman, who, in pure kindness 
to the managers, asked whether it would not be possible 
to establish for their assistance a sort of King's Proctor 
to whom plays might be referred for an official legal 
opinion as to their compliance with the law before pro- 
duction. There are several objections to this proposal; 
and they may as well be stated in case the proposal 
should be revived. In the first place, no lawyer with the 
most elementary knowledge of the law of libel in its vari- 
ous applications to sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy, 
could answer for the consequences of producing any play 
whatsoever as to which the smallest question could arise 
in the mind of any sane person. I have been a critic 
and an author in active service for thirty years; and 
though nothing I have written has ever been prosecuted 
in England or made the subject of legal proceedings, yet 
I have never published in my life an article, a play, or 
a book, as to which, if I had taken legal advice, an 
expert could have assured me that I was proof against 
prosecution or against an action for damages by the per- 
sons criticized. No doubt a sensible solicitor might have 
advised me that the risk was no greater than all men 



Preface 71 

have to take in dangerous trades ; but such an opinion, 
though it may encourage a client, does not protect him. 
For example, if a publisher asks his solicitor whether 
he may venture on an edition of Sterne's Sentimental 
Journey, or a manager whether he may produce King 
Lear without risk of prosecution, the solicitor will ad- 
vise him to go ahead. But if the solicitor or counsel 
consulted by liim were asked for a guarantee that neither 
of these works was a libel, he would have to reply that 
he could give no such guarantee; that, on the contrary, 
it was his duty to warn his client that both of them are 
obscene libels ; that King Lear, containing as it does 
perhaps the most appalling blasphemy that desjjair ever 
uttered, is a blasphemous libel, and that it is doubtful 
whether it could not be construed as a seditious libel 
as well. As to Ibsen's Brand (the play which made him 
popular with the most earnestly religious people) no 
sane solicitor would advise his client even to chance it 
except in a broadly cultivated and tolerant (or indiffer- 
ent) modern city. The lighter plays would be no bet- 
ter off. What lawyer could accept any responsibility 
for the production of Sardou's Divorgons or Clyde 
Fitch's The Woman in the Case? Put the proposed 
King's Proctor in operation to-morrow; and what will 
be the result? The managers will find that instead of 
insuring them as the Lord Chamberlain does, he will 
warn them that every play they submit to him is vul- 
nerable to the law, and that they must produce it not 
only on the ordinary risk of acting on their own respon- 
sibility, but at the very grave additional risk of doing 
so in the teeth of an official warning. Under such cir- 
cumstances, what manager would resort a second time 
to the Proctor ; and how would the Proctor live without 
fees, unless indeed the Government gave him a salary 
for doing nothing? The institution would not last a 
year, except as a job for somebody. 



72 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 
Counsel's Opinion 

The proposal is still less plausible when it is consid- 
ered that at present, without any new legislation at all, 
any manager who is doubtful about a play can obtain 
the advice of his solicitor, or Counsel's opinion, if he 
thinks it will be of any service to him. The verdict of 
the proposed King's Proctor would be nothing but Coun- 
sel's opinion without the liberty of choice of coun- 
sel, possibly cheapened, but sure to be adverse ; for an 
official cannot give practical advice as a friend and a 
man of the world : he must stick to the letter of the law 
and take no chances. And as far as the law is con- 
cerned, journalism, literature, and the drama exist only 
by custom or sufferance. 

Wanted: A New Magna Charta 

This leads us to a very vital question. Is it not pos- 
sible to amend the law so as to make it possible for a 
lawyer to advise his client that he may publish the 
works of Blake, Zola, and Swinburne, or produce the 
plays of Ibsen and Mr. Granville Barker, or print an 
ordinary criticism in his newspaper, without the possi- 
bility of finding himself in prison, or mulcted in dam- 
ages and costs in consequence ? No doubt it is ; but only 
by a declaration of constitutional right to blaspheme, 
rebel, and deal with tabooed subjects. Such a declara- 
tion is not just now within the scope of practical politics, 
although we are compelled to act to a great extent as if 
it was actually part of the constitution. All that can 
be done is to take my advice and limit the necessary 
public control of the theatres in such a manner as to 
prevent its being abused as a censorship. We have ready 
to our hand the machinery of licensing as applied to 
public-houses. A licensed victualler can now be assured 



Preface 'TS 

confidently by his lawyer that a magistrate cannot refuse 
to renew his licence on the ground that he (the magis- 
trate) is a teetotaller and has seen too much of the evil 
of drink to sanction its sale. The magistrate must give 
a judicial reason for his refusal, meaning really a con- 
stitutional reason; and his teetotalism is not such a rea- 
son. In the same way you can protect a theatrical man- 
ager by ruling out certain reasons as unconstitutional, as 
suggested in my statement. Combine this with the abo- 
lition of the common informer's power to initiate pro- 
ceedings, and you will have gone as far as seems pos- 
sible at present. You will have local control of the 
theatres for police purposes and sanitary purposes with- 
out censorship ; and I do not see what more is possible 
until we get a formal Magna Charta declaring all the 
categories of libel and the blasphemy laws contrary to 
public liberty, and repealing and defining accordingly. 

Proposed: A New Star Chamber 

Yet we cannot mention Magna Charta without recall- 
ing how useless such documents are to a nation which 
has no more political comprehension nor political virtue 
than King John. When Henry VII. calmly proceeded 
to tear up Magna Charta by establishing the Star Cham- 
ber (a criminal court consisting of a committee of the 
Privy Council without a jury) nobody objected until, 
about a century and a half later, the Star Cham- 
ber began cutting off the ears of eminent XVII. cen- 
tury Nonconformists and standing them in the pillory; 
and then the Nonconformists, and nobody else, abol- 
ished the Star Chamber. And if anyone doubts that 
we are quite ready to establisli the Star Chamber again, 
let him read the Report of the Joint Select Com- 
mittee, on which I now venture to offer a few criticisms. 

The report of the Committee, which will be foimd in 



74 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

the bluebook, should be read with attention and respect 
as far as page x., up to which point it is an able and 
well-written statement of the case. From page x. on- 
ward, when it goes on from diagnosing the disease to 
prescribing the treatment, it should be read with even 
greater attention but with no respect whatever, as the 
main object of the treatment is to conciliate the How 
Not To Do It majority. It contains, however, one very 
notable proposal, the same being nothing more or less 
than to revive the Star Chamber for the purpose of 
dealing with heretical or seditious plays and their au- 
thors, and indeed with all charges against theatrical en- 
tertainments except common police cases of indecency. 
The reason given is that for which the Star Chamber 
was created by Henry VII: that is, the inadequacy of 
the ordinary law. " We consider," says the report, 
" that the law which prevents or punishes indecency, 
blasphemy and libel in printed publications [it does not, 
by the way, except in the crudest police cases] would 
not be adequate for the control of the drama." There- 
fore a committee of the Privy Council is to be empow- 
ered to suppress plays and punish managers and authors 
at its pleasure, on the motion of the Attorney-General, 
without a jury. The members of the Committee will, 
of course, be men of high standing and character: other- 
wise they would not be on the Privy Council. That is 
to say, they will have all the qualifications of Archbishop 
Laud. 

Now I have no guarantee that any member of the ma- 
jority of the Joint Select Committee ever heard of the 
Star Chamber or of Archbishop Laud. One of them did 
not know that politics meant anything more than party 
electioneering. Nothing is more alarming than the ig- 
norance of our public men of the commonplaces of our 
history, and their consequent readiness to repeat experi- 
ments which have in the past produced national catas- 



Preface 75 

trophes. At all events, whether they knew what they 
were doing or not, there can be no question as to what 
they did. They proposed virtually that the Act of the 
Long Parliament in 1641 shall be repealed, and the 
Star Chamber re-established, in order that playwrights 
and managers may be punished for unspecified offences 
unknown to the law. When I say unspecified, I should 
say specified as follows (see page xi. of the report) in 
the case of a play. 

(a) To be indecent. 

(6) To contain offensive personalities. 

(c) To represent on the stage in an invidious manner 
a living person, or any person recently dead. 

{d) To do violence to the sentiment of religious rev- 
erence. 

(e) To be calculated to conduce to vice or crime. 

(/) To be calculated to impair friendly relations with 
any foreign power. 

(g) To be calculated to cause a breach of the peace. 

Now it is clear that there is no play yet written, or 
possible to be written, in this world, that might not be 
condemned under one or other of these heads. How any 
sane man, not being a professed enemy of public liberty, 
could put his hand to so monstrous a catalogue passes 
my understanding. Had a comparatively definite and 
innocent clause been added forbidding the afiirmation or 
denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the country 
would have been up in arms at once. Lord Ribblesdale 
made an effort to reduce the seven categories to the old 
formula " not to be fitting for the preservation of good 
manners, decorum, or the public peace " ; but this pro- 
posal was not carried; whilst on Lord Gorell's motion 
a final widening of the net was achieved by adding the 
phrase "to be calculated to"; so that even if a play 



76 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

does not produce any of the results feared, the author 
can still be punished on the ground that his play is " cal- 
culated " to produce them. I have no hesitation in say- 
ing that a committee capable of such an outrageous dis- 
play of thoughtlessness and historical ignorance as this 
•paragraph of its report implies deserves to be haled be- 
fore the tribunal it has itself proposed, and dealt with 
under a general clause levelled at conduct " calculated 
to " overthrow the liberties of England. 

Possibilities of the Proposal 

Still, though I am certainly not willing to give Lord 
Gorell the chance of seeing me in the pillory with my 
ears cut off if I can help it, I daresay many authors 
would rather take their chance with a Star Chamber 
than with a jury, just as some soldiers would rather take 
their chance with a court-martial than at Quarter Ses- 
sions. P'or that matter, some of them would rather take 
their chance with the Lord Chamberlain than with either. 
And though this is no reason for depriving the whole 
body of authors of the benefit of Magna Charta, still, 
if the right of the proprietor of a play to refuse the 
good offices of the Privy Council and to perform the play 
until his accusers had indicted him at law, and obtained 
the verdict of a jury against him, were sufficiently 
guarded, the proposed committee might be set up and 
used for certain purposes. For instance, it might be 
made a condition of the intervention of the Attorney- 
General or the Director of Public Prosecutions that he 
should refer an accused play to tlie committee, and obtain 
their sanction before taking action, offering the propri- 
etor of the play, if the Committee thought fit, an op- 
portimity of voluntarily accepting trial by the Committee 
as an alternative to prosecution in the ordinary course 
of law. But the Committee should have no powers of 



Preface 77 

punishment beyond the power (formidable enough) of 
suspending performances of the play. If it thought that 
additional punishment was called for^ it could order a 
prosecution without allowing the proprietor or author 
of the play the alternative of a trial by itself. The au- 
thor of the play should be made a party to all proceed- 
ings of the Committee, and have the right to defend 
himself in person or by counsel. This would piovide a 
check on the Attorney-General (who might be as bigoted 
as any of the municipal aldermen who are so much 
dreaded by the actor-managers) without enabling the 
Committee to abuse its powers for party, class, or sec- 
tarian ends beyond that irreducible minimum of abuse 
which a popular jury would endorse, for which minimum 
there is no remedy. 

But when everything is said for the Star Chamber 
that can be said, and every precaution taken to secure to 
those whom it pursues the alternative of trial by jury, 
the expedient still remains a very questionable one, to be 
endured for the sake of its protective rather than its 
repressive powers. It should abolish the present quaint 
toleration of rioting in theatres. For example, if it is 
to be an offence to perform a play which the proposed 
new Committee shall condemn, it should also be made an 
offence to disturb a performance which the Committee 
has not condemned. " Brawling " at a theatre should be 
dealt with as severely as brawling in church if the cen- 
sorship is to be taken out of the hands of the public. At 
present Jenny Geddes may throw her stool at the head 
of a playwright who preaches unpalatable doctrine to 
her, or rather, since her stool is a fixture, she may hiss 
and hoot and make it impossible to proceed with the 
performance, even although nobody has compelled her to 
come to the theatre or suspended her liberty to stay 
away, and although she has no claim on an unendowed 
theatre for her spiritual necessities, as sshe bas on her 



78 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

parish church. If mob censorship cannot be trusted to 
keep naughty playwrights in order, still less can it be 
trusted to keep the pioneers of thought in countenance; 
and I submit that anyone hissing a play permitted by 
the new censorship should be guilty of contempt of court. 

Star Chamber SentimentaHty 

But what is most to be dreaded in a Star Chamber is 
not its sternness but its sentimentality. There is no 
worse censorship than one whicli considers only the feel- 
ings of the spectators, except perhaps one which consid- 
ers the feelings of people who do not even witness the 
performance. Take the case of the Passion Play at 
Oberammergau. The offence given by a representation 
of the Crucifixion on the stage is not bounded by front- 
iers : further, it is an offence of which the voluntary spec- 
tators are guilty no less than the actors. If it is to be 
tolerated at all: if we are not to make war on the Ger- 
man Empire for permitting it, nor punish the English 
people who go to Bavaria to see it and thereby endow it 
with English money, we may as well tolerate it in Lon- 
don, where nobody need go to see it except those who 
are not offended by it. When Wagner's Parsifal be- 
comes available for representation in London, many peo- 
ple will be sincerely horrified when the miracle of the 
Mass is simulated on the stage of Covent Garden, and 
the Holy Ghost descends in the form of a dove. But 
if the Committee of the Privy Council, or the Lord 
Chamberlain, or anyone else, were to attempt to keep 
Parsifal from us to spare the feelings of these people, 
it would not be long before even the most thoughtless 
champions of the censorship would see that the prin- 
ciple of doing nothing that could shock anybody had 
reduced itself to absurdity. No quarter whatever should 
be given to the bigotry of people so unfit for social life 



Preface 79 

as to insist not only that their own prejudices and su- 
perstitions should have the fullest toleration but that 
everybody else should be compelled to think and act as 
they do. Every service in St. Paul's Cathedral is an 
outrage to the opinions of the congregation of the Ro- 
man Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. Every Liberal 
meeting is a defiance and a challenge to the most cher- 
ished opinions of the Unionists. A law to compel the 
Roman Catholics to attend service at St. Paul's, or the 
Liberals to attend the meetings of the Primrose League 
would be resented as an insufferable tyranny. But a law 
to shut up both St. Paul's and the Westminster Cathe- 
dral, and to put down political meetings and associations 
because of the offence given by them to many worthy and 
excellent people, would be a far worse tyranny, because 
it would kill the religious and political life of the coun- 
try outright, whereas to compel people to attend the 
services and meetings of their opponents would greatly 
enlarge their minds, and would actually be a good thing 
if it were enforced all round. I should not object to a 
law to compel everybody to read two newspapers, each 
violently opposed to the other in politics ; but to forbid 
us to read newspapers at all would be to maim us men- 
tally and cashier our country in the ranks of civilization. 
I deny that anybody has the right to demand more from 
me, over and above lawful conduct in a general sense, 
than liberty to stay away from the theatre in which my 
plays are represented. If he is unfortunate enough to 
have a religion so petty that it can be insulted (any man 
is as welcome to insult my religion, if he can, as he is 
to insult the universe) I claim the right to insult it to 
my heart's content, if I choose, provided I do not compel 
him to come and hear me. If I think this country ought 
to make war on any other country, then, so long as war 
remains lawful, I claim full liberty to write and perform 
a play inciting the coimtry to that war without interfer- 



80 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

ence from the ambassadors of the menaced country. I 
may " give pain to many worthy people, and pleasure 
to none," as the Censor's pet phrase puts it: I may even 
make Europe a cockpit and Asia a shambles : no matter : 
if preachers and politicians, statesmen and soldiers, may 
do these things — if it is right that such things should be 
done, then I claim my share in the right to do them. If 
the proposed Committee is meant to prevent me from 
doing these things whilst men of other professions are 
permitted to do them, then I protest with all my might 
against the formation of such a Committee. If it is to 
protect me, on the contrary, against the attacks that 
bigots and corrupt pornographers may make on me by 
appealing to the ignorance and prejudices of common 
jurors, then I welcome it; but is that really the object 
of its proposers? And if it is, what guarantee have I 
that the new tribunal will not presently resolve into a 
mere committee to avoid unpleasantness and keep the 
stage "in good taste"? It is no more possible for me 
to do my work honestly as a playwright without giving 
pain than it is for a dentist. The nation's morals are 
like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it 
hurts to touch them. Prevent dentists and dramatists 
from giving pain, and not only will our morals become 
as carious as our teeth, but toothache and the plagues 
that follow neglected morality will presently cause more 
agony than all the dentists and dramatists at their worst 
have caused since the world began. 

Anything for a Quiet Life 

Another doubt : would a Committee of the Privy Coun- 
cil really face the risks that must be taken by all com- 
munities as the price of our freedom to evolve ? Would 
it not rather take the popular English view that freedom 
and virtue generally are sweet and desirable only when 



Preface 81 

they cost nothing? Nothing worth having is to be had 
without risk. A mother risks her child's life every time 
she lets it ramble through the countryside, or cross the 
street, or clamber over the rocks on the shore by itself. 
A father risks his son's morals when he gives him a 
latchkey. The members of the Joint Select Committee 
risked my producing a revolver and shooting them when 
they admitted me to the room without having me hand- 
cuffed. And these risks are no unreal ones. Every day 
some child is maimed or drowned and some young man 
infected with disease; and political assassinations have 
been appallingly frequent of late years. Railway trav- 
elling has its risks ; motoring has its risks ; aeroplaning 
has its risks; every advance we make costs us a risk of 
some sort. And though these are only risks tj the indi- 
vidual, to the community they are certainties. It is not 
certain that I will be killed this year in a railway acci- 
dent; but it is certain that somebody will. The inven- 
tion of printing and the freedom of the press have 
brought upon us, not merely risks of their abuse, but 
the establishment as part of our social routine of some 
of the worst evils a community can suffer from. People 
who realize these evils shriek for the suppression of mo- 
tor cars, the virtual imprisonment and enslavement of 
the young, the passing of Press Laws (especially in 
Egypt, India, and Ireland), exactly as they shriek for a 
censorship of the stage. The freedom of the stage will 
be abused just as certainly as the complaisance and in- 
nocence of the censorship is abused at present. It will 
also be used by writers like myself for raising very diffi- 
cult and disturbing questions, social, political, and relig- 
ious, at moments which may be extremely inconvenient 
to the government. Is it certain that a Committee of 
the Privy Council would stand up to all this as the price 
of liberty? I doubt it. If I am to be at the mercy 
of a nice amiable Committee of elderly gentlemen (I 



82 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

know all about elderly gentlemen, being one myself) 
whose motto is the highly popular one, " Anything for a 
quiet life/' and who will make the inevitable abuses of 
freedom by our blackguards an excuse for interfering 
with any disquieting use of it by myself, then I shall 
be worse off than I am with the Lord Chamberlain, 
whose mind is not broad enough to obstruct the whole 
range of thought. If it were, he would be given a more 
difficult post. 

Shall the Examiner of Plays Starve? 

And here I may be reminded that if I prefer the Lord 
Chamberlain I can go to the Lord Chamberlain, who is 
to retain all his present functions for the benefit of 
those who prefer to be judged by him. But I am not 
so sure that the Lord Chamberlain will be able to ex- 
ercise those functions for long if resort to him is to be 
optional. Let me be kinder to him than he has been 
to me, and uncover for him the pitfalls which the Joint 
Select Committee have dug (and concealed) in his path. 
Consider how the voluntary system must inevitably work. 
The Joint Select Committee expressly urges that the 
Lord Chamberlain's licence must not be a bar to a prose- 
cution. Granted that in spite of this reservation the 
licence would prove in future as powerful a defence as 
it has been in the past, yet the voluntary clause never- 
theless places the manager at the mercy of any author 
who makes it a condition of his contract that his play 
shall not be submitted for licence. I should probably 
take that course without opposition from the manager. 
For the manager, knowing that three of my plays have 
been refused a licence, and that it would be far safer to 
produce a play for which no licence had been asked than 
one for which it had been asked and refused, would 
agree that it was more prudent, in my case, to avail him- 



Preface 83 

self of the power of dispensing with the Lord Chamber- 
lain's licence. But now mark the consequences. The 
manager, having thus discovered that his best policy was 
to dispense with the licence in the few doubtful cases, 
would presently ask himself why he should spend two 
guineas each on licences for the many plays as to which 
no question could conceivably arise. What risk does any 
manager run in producing such works as Sweet Laven- 
der, Peter Pan, The Silver King, or any of the 99 per 
cent of plays that are equally neutral on controversial 
questions? Does anyone seriously believe that the man- 
agers would continue to pay the Lord Chamberlain two 
guineas a play out of mere love and loyalty, only to 
create an additional risk in the case of controversial 
plays, and to guard against risks that do not exist in 
the case of the great bulk of other productions? Only 
those would remain faithful to him who produce such 
plays as the Select Committee began by discussing in 
camera, and ended by refusing to discuss at all because 
they were too nasty. These people would still try to get 
a licence, and would still no doubt succeed as they do 
today. But could the King's Reader of Plays live on 
his fees from these plays alone ; and if he could how long 
would his post survive the discredit of licensing only 
pornographic plays? It is clear to me that the Exam- 
iner would be starved out of existence, and the censor- 
ship perish of desuetude. Perhaps that is exactly what 
the Select Committee contemplated. If so, I have noth- 
ing more to say, except that I think sudden death would 
be more merciful. 



Lord Gorell's Awakening 

In the meantime, conceive the situation which would 
arise if a licensed play were prosecuted. To make it 
clearer, let us imagine any other offender — say a com- 



84 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

pany promoter with a fraudulent prospectus — pleading 
in Court that he had induced the Lord Chamberlain to 
issue a certificate that the prospectus contained nothing 
objectionable^ and that on the strength of that certificate 
he issued it; also, that by law the Court could do noth- 
ing to him except order him to wind up his company. 
Some such vision as this must have come to Lord Gorell 
when he at last grappled seriously with the problem. 
Mr. Harcourt seized the opportunity to make a last 
rally. He seconded Lord Gorell's proposal that the 
Committee should admit that its scheme of an optional 
censorship was an elaborate absurdity, and report that 
all censorship befoi'e production was out of the question. 
But it was too late: the voile face was too sudden and 
complete. It was Lord Gorell whose vote had turned 
the close division which took place on the question of 
receiving my statement. It was Lord Gorell without 
whose countenance and authority the farce of the books 
could never have been performed. Yet here was Lord 
Gorell, after assenting to all the provisions for the op- 
tional censorship jDaragraph by paragraph, suddenly in- 
forming his colleagues that they had been wrong all 
through and that I had been right all through, and in- 
viting them to scrap half their work and adopt my con- 
clusion. No wonder Lord Gorell got only one vote: 
that of Mr. Harcourt. But the incident is not the less 
significant. Lord Gorell carried moi'e weight than any 
other member of the Committee on the legal and con- 
stitutional aspect of the question. Had he begun where 
he left off — had he at the outset put down his foot on 
the notion that an optional penal law could ever be any- 
thing but a gross contradiction in terms, that part of 
the Committee's proposals would never have come into 
existence. 



Preface 85 



Judges: Their Professional Limitations 

I do not, however, appeal to Lord Gorell's judgment 
on all points. It is inevitable that a judge should be 
deeply impressed by his professional experience with a 
sense of the impotence of judges and laws and courts 
to deal satisfactorily with evils which are so Protean and 
elusive as to defy definition, and which yet seem to pre- 
sent quite simple problems to the common sense of men 
of the world. You have only to imagine the Privy 
Council as consisting of men of the world highly en- 
dowed with common sense, to persuade yourself that 
the supplementing of the law by the common sense of 
the Privy Council would settle the whole difficulty. But 
no man knows what he means by common sense, though 
every man can tell you that it is very uncommon, even in 
Privy Councils. And since every ploughman is a man 
of .the world, it is evident that even the phrase itself 
does not mean what it says. As a matter of fact, it 
means in ordinary use simply a man who will not make 
himself disagreeable for the sake of a principle: just the 
sort of man who should never be allowed to meddle with 
political rights. Now to a judge a political right, that 
is, a dogma which is above our laws and conditions our 
laws, instead of being subject to them, is anarchic and 
abhorrent. That is why I trust Lord Gorell when he is 
defending the integrity of the law against the proposal 
to make it in any sense optional, whilst I very strongly 
mistrust him, as I mistrust all professional judges, when 
political rights are in danger. 

Conclusion 

I must conclude by recommending the Government to 
take my advice wherever it conflicts with that of the 
Joint Select Committee. It is, I think, obviously more 



86 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

deeply considered and better informed, though I say it 
that should not. At all events, I have given my rea- 
sons ; and at that I must leave it. As the tradition which 
makes Malvolio not only Master of the Revels but Mas- 
ter of the Mind of England, and which has come down 
to us from Henry VIII., is manifestly doomed to the 
dustbin, the sooner it goes there the better ; for the demo- 
cratic control which naturally succeeds it can easily be 
limited so as to prevent it becoming either a censorship 
or a tyranny. The Examiner of Plays should receive a 
generous pension, and be set free to practise privately 
as an expert adviser of theatrical managers. There is 
no reason why they should be deprived of the counsel 
they so highly value. 

It only remains to say that public performances of 
The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet are still prohibited 
in Great Britain by the Lord Chamberlain. An attempt 
was made to prevent even its performance in Ireland by 
some indiscreet Castle officials in the absence of the 
Lord Lieutenant. This attempt gave extraordinary pub- 
licity to the production of the play; and every possible 
effort was made to persuade the Irish public that the 
performance would be an outrage to their religion, and 
to provoke a repetition of the rioting that attended the 
first performances of Synge's Playboy of the Western 
World before the most sensitive and, on provocation, the 
most turbulent audience in the kingdom. The directors 
of the Irish National Theatre, Lady Gregory and Mr. 
William Butler Yeats, rose to the occasion with inspirit- 
ing courage. I am a conciliatory person, and was will- 
ing, as I always am, to make every concession in return 
for having my own way. But Lady Gregory and Mr. 
Yeats not only would not yield an inch, but insisted, 
within the due limits of gallant warfare, on taking the 
field with every circumstance of defiance, and winning 
the battle with every trophy of victory. Their triumph 



Preface 87 

was as complete as they could have desired. The per- 
formance exhausted the possibilities of success, and pro- 
voked no murmur, though it inspired several approving 
sermons. Later on. Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats 
brought the play to London and performed it under the 
Lord Chamberlain's nose, through the instrumentality of 
the Stage Society. 

After this, the play was again submitted to the Lord 
Chamberlain. But, though beaten, he, too, understands 
the art of How Not To Do It. He licensed the play, 
but endorsed on his licence the condition that all the 
passages which implicated God in the history of Blanco 
Posnet must be omitted in representation. All the 
coarseness, the profligacy, the prostitution, the violence, 
the drinking-bar humor into which the light shines in 
the play are licensed, but the light itself is extinguished. 
I need hardly say that I have not availed myself of this 
licence, and do not intend to. There is enough licensed 
darkness in our theatres today without my adding to it. 

Atot St. Lawrence, 
Uth July 1910. 



Postscript. — Since the above was written the Lord 
Chamberlain has made an attempt to evade his respon- 
sibility and perhaps to postpone his doom by appointing 
an advisory committee, unknown to the law, on which 
he will presumably throw any odium that may attach 
to refusals of licences in the future. This strange and 
lawless body will hardly reassure our moralists, who 
object much more to the plays he licenses than to those 
he suppresses, and are therefore unmoved by his plea that 
his refusals are few and far between. It consists of two 
eminent actors (one retired), an Oxford professor of lit- 
erature, and two eminent barristers. As their assembly 
is neither created by statute nor sanctioned by custom^ it 



88 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

is difficult to know what to call it until it advises the 
Lord Chamberlain to deprive some author of his means 
of livelihood, when it will, I presume, become a con- 
spiracy, and be indictable accordingly; unless, indeed, it 
can persuade the Courts to recognize it as a new Estate 
of the Realm, created by the Lord Chamberlain. This 
constitutional position is so questionable that I strongly 
advise the members to resign promptly before the Lord 
Chamberlain gets them into trouble. 



THE SHEWING.UP OF BLANCO 
POSNET 

A number of women are sitting working together in a 
big room not unlike an old English tithe barn in its tim- 
bered construction, but with windows high up next the 
roof. It is furnished ~ as a courthouse , with the floor 
raised next the walls, and on this raised flooring a seat 
for the Sheriff, a rough jury box on his right, and a bar 
to put prisoners to on his left. In the well in the middle 
is a table with benches round it. A few other benches 
are in disorder round the room. The autumn sun is 
shining warmly through the windows and the open door. 
The women, whose dress and speech are those of pion- 
eers of civilization in a territory of the United States of 
America, are seated rowid the table and on the benches, 
shucking nuts. The conversation is at its height. 

Babsy [a bumptious young slattern, with some good 
looks'] I say that a man that would steal a horse would 
do anything. 

Lottie [a sefitimental girl, neat and clean] Well, I 
never should look at it in that way. I do think killing 
a man is worse any day than stealing a horse. 

Hannah [elderly and ivise] I dont say it's right to 
kill a man. In a place like this, where every man has 
to have a revolver, and where theres so much to try 



90 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

people's tempers, the men get to be a deal too free with 
one another in the way of shooting. God knows it's hard 
enough to have to bring a boy into the world and nurse 
him up to be a man only to have him brought home to 
you on a shutter, perhaps for nothing, or only just to 
shew that the man that killed him wasnt afraid of him. 
But men are like children when they get a gun in their 
hands : theyre not content til theyve used it on somebody. 

Jessie [a good-natured but sharp-tongued, hoity-toity 
young woman; Bahsy's rival in good looks and her su- 
perior in tidiness] They shoot for the love of it. Look 
at them at a lynching. Theyre not content to hang the 
man; but directly the poor creature is swung up they 
all shoot him full of holes, wasting their cartridges that 
cost solid money, and pretending they do it in horror 
of his wickedness, though half of them would have a 
rope round their own necks if all they did was known — 
let alone the mess it makes, 

Lottie. I wish we could get more civilized. I dont 
like all this lynching and shooting. I dont believe any 
of us like it, if the truth were known. 

Babsy. Our Sheriff is a real strong man. You want 
a strong man for a rough lot like our people here. He 
aint afraid to shoot and he aint afraid to hang. Lucky 
for us quiet ones, too. 

Jessie. Oh, dont talk to me. I know what men are. 
Of course he aint afraid to shoot and he aint afraid to 
hang. Wheres the risk in that with the law on his side 
and the whole crowd at his back longing for the lynch- 
ing as if it was a spree.'' Would one of them own to 
it or let him own to it if they lynched the wrong man? 
Not them. What they call justice in this place is noth- 
ing but a breaking out of the devil thats in all of us. 
What I want to see is a Sheriff that aint afraid not to 
shoot and not to hang. 

Emma [a sneak who sides with Babsy or Jessie, ac- 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 91 

cording to the fortune of rvar] Well, I must say it does 
sicken me to see Sheriff Kemp putting down his foot, as 
he calls it. Why dont he put it down on his wife? She 
wants it worse than half the men he lynches. He and 
his Vigilance Committee, indeed! 

Babsy [incensed] Oh, well! if people are going to 
take the part of horse-thieves against the Sheriff — ! 

Jessie. Who's taking the part of horse-thieves against 
the Sheriff.? 

Babsy. You are. Waitle your own horse is stolen, 
and youll know better. I had an uncle that died of 
thirst in the sage brush because a negro stole his horse. 
But they caught him and burned him; and serve him 
right, too. 

Emma. I have known that a child was born crooked 
because its mother had to do a horse's work that was 
stolen. 

Babsy. There! You hear that? I say stealing a 
horse is ten times worse than killing a man. And if the 
Vigilance Committee ever gets hold of you, youd better 
have killed twenty men than as much as stole a saddle 
or bridle, much less a horse. 

Elder Daniels comes in. 

Elder Daniels. Sorry to disturb you, ladies; but 
the Vigilance Committee has taken a prisoner; and they 
want the room to try him in. 

Jessie. But they cant try him til Sheriff Kemp comes 
back from the wharf. 

Elder Daniels. Yes; but we have to keep the pris- 
oner here til he comes. 

Babsy. What do you want to put him here for? 
Cant you tie him up in the Sheriff's stable? 

Elder Daniels. He has a soul to be saved, almost 
like the rest of us. I am bound to try to put some re- 
ligion into him before he goes into his Maker's presence 
after the trial. 



92 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

Hannah. What has he done, Mr Daniels ? 

Elder Daniels. Stole a horse. 

Babsy. And are we to be turned out of the town hall 
for a horse-thief.^ Aint a stable good enough for his 
religion .^ 

Elder Daniels. It may be good enough for his, 
Babsy; but, by your leave, it is not good enough for 
mine. Wliile I am Elder here, I shall umbly endeavour 
to keep up the dignity of Him I serve to the best of 
my small ability. So I must ask you to be good enough 
to clear out. Allow me. [He takes the sack of husks 
and put it out of the way against the panels of the jury 
box^. 

The Women [murmuring] Thats always the way. 
Just as we'd settled down to work. What harm are we 
doing? Well, it is tiresome. Let them finish the job 
themselves. Oh dear, oh dear ! We cant have a minute 
to ourselves. Shoving us out like that ! 

Hannah. Whose horse was it, Mr Daniels? 

Elder Daniels [retu7-ning to move the other sack] I 
am sorry to say that it was the Sheriff's horse — the one 
he loaned to young Strapper. Strapper loaned it to me ; 
and the thief stole it, thinking it was mine. If it had 
been mine, I'd have forgiven him cheerfully. I'm sure 
I hoped he would get away; for he had two hours start 
of the Vigilance Committee. But they caught him. [He 
disposes of the other sack also]. 

Jessie. It cant have been much of a horse if they 
caught him with two hours start. 

Elder Daniels [coming back to the centre of the 
group] The strange thing is that he wasnt on the horse 
when they took him. He was walking; and of course he 
denies that he ever had the horse. The Sheriff's brother 
wanted to tie him up and lash him till he confessed what 
he'd done with it; but I couldnt allow that: it's not the 
law. 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 93 

Babsy. Law ! What right has a horse-thief to any 
law? Law is thrown away on a brute like that. 

Elder Daniels. Dont say that, Babsy. No man 
should be made to confess by cruelty until religion has 
been tried and failed. Please God I'll get the where- 
abouts of the horse from him if youll be so good as to 
clear out from this. [Disturbance outside]. They are 
bringing him in. Now ladies ! please, please. 

They rise reluctantly. Hannah, Jessie, and Lottie re- 
treat to the Sheriff's bench, shepherded by Daniels; but 
the other women crowd forward behind Babsy and Emma 
to see the prisoner. 

Blanco Posnet is brought in by Strapper Kemp, the 
Sheriff's brother, and a cross-eyed man called Squinty. 
Others follow. Blanco is evidently a blackguard. It 
woidd be necessary to clean him to make a close guess 
at his age; but he is under forty, and an upturned, red 
moustache, and the arrangement of his hair in a crest 
on his brow, proclaim the dandy in spite of his intense 
disreputableness. He carries his head high, and has a 
fairly resolute mouth, though the fire of incipient de- 
lirium tremens is in his eye. 

His arms are bound with a rope with a long end, 
which Squinty holds. They release him when he en- 
ters; and he stretches himself and lounges across the 
courthouse in front of the women. Strapper and the 
men remain between him and the door. 

Babsy \spitting at him as he passes her] Horse- 
thief ! horse-thief ! 

Others. You will hang for it; do you hear? And 
serve you right. Serve you right. That will teach you. 
I wouldnt wait to try you. Lynch him straight off, the 
varmint. Yes, yes. Tell the boys. Lynch him. 

Blanco \mocking] " Angels ever bright and fair — " 

Babsy. You call me an angel, and I'll smack your 
dirty face for you. 



94 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

Blanco. " Take, oh take me to your care." 

Emma. There wont be any angels where youre 
going to. 

Others. Aha! Devils, more likely. And too good 
company for a horse-thief. 

All. Horse-thief ! Horse-thief ! Horse-thief ! 

Blanco. Do women make the law here, or men.'' 
Drive these heifers out. 

The Women. Oh! [They rush at him, vituperating, 
screaming passionately, tearing at him. Lottie puts her 
fingers in her ears and runs out. Hannah follows, shak- 
ing her head. Blanco is thrown down]. Oh, did you 
hear what he called us ? You foul-mouthed brute ! You 
liar ! How dare you put such a name to a decent 
woman ? Let me get at him. You coward ! Oh, he 
struck me: did you see that? Lynch him! Pete, will 
you stand by and hear me called names by a skunk like 
that.'' Burn him: burn him I Thats what I'd do with 
him. Aye, burn him ! 

The Men [pulling the women away from Blanco, and 
getting them out partly by violence and partly by coax- 
ing] Here I come out of this. Let him alone. Clear the 
courthouse. Come on now. Out with you. Now, Sally : 
out you go. Let go my hair, or I'll twist your arm out. 
Ah, would you .'' Now, then : get along. You know you 
must go. Whats the use of scratching like that.'* Now, 
ladies, ladies, ladies. How would you like it if you were 
going to be hanged ? 

At last the women are pushed out, leaving Elder Dan- 
iels, the Sheriff's brother Strapper Kemp, and a few 
others with Blanco. Strapper is a lad just turning into 
a man: strong, selfish, sulky, and determined. 

Blanco [sitting up and tidying himself] — 

Oh woman, in our hours of ease. 
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please— 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 95 

Is my face scratched ? I can feel their damned claws all 
over me still. Am I bleeding? [He sits on the nearest 
bench]. 

Elder Daniels. Nothing to hurt. Theyve drawn a 
drop or two under your left eye. 

Strapper. Lucky for you to have an eye left in your 
head. 

Blanco [wiping the blood off] — 

When pain and anguish wring the brow, 
A ministering angel thou. 

Go out to them, Strapper Kemp; and tell them about 
your big brother's little horse that some wicked man 
stole. Go and cry in your mammy's lap. 

Strapper [furious] You jounce me any more about 
that horse, Blanco Posnet; and I'll — I'll — 

Blanco. Youll scratch my face, wont you.'' Yah! 
Your brother's the Sheriff, aint he.'' 

Strapper. Yes, he is. He hangs horse-thieves. 

Blanco [with calm conviction] He's a rotten Sher- 
iff. Oh, a rotten Sheriff. If he did his first duty he'd 
hang himself. This is a rotten town. Your fathers 
came here on a false alarm of gold-digging; and when 
the gold didnt pan out, they lived by licking their young 
into habits of honest industry. 

Strapper. If I hadnt promised Elder Daniels here 
to give him a chance to keep you out of Hell, I'd take 
the job of twisting your neck off the hands of the Vig- 
ilance Committee. 

Blanco [with infinite scorn] You and your rotten 
Elder, and your rotten Vigilance Committee ! 

Strapper. Theyre sound enough to hang a horse- 
thief, anyhow. 

Blanco. Any fool can hang the wisest man in the 
coimtry. Nothing he likes better. But you cant hang 
me. 



96 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

Strapper. Cant we? 

Blanco. No^ you cant. I left the town this morn- 
ing before sunrise, because it's a rotten town, and I 
couldnt bear to see it in the light. Your brother's horse 
did the same, as any sensible horse would. Instead of 
going to look for the horse, you went looking for me. 
That was a rotten thing to do, because the horse belonged 
to your brother — or to the man he stole it f/om — and I 
dont belong to him. Well, you found me; but you didn't 
find the horse. If I had took the horse, I'd have been 
on the horse. Would I have taken all that time to get 
to where I did if I'd a horse to carry me? 

Strapper. I dont believe you started not for two 
hours after you say you did. 

Blanco. Who cares what you believe or dont be- 
lieve? Is a man worth six of you to be hanged because 
youve lost your big brother's horse, and youll want to 
kill somebody to relieve your rotten feelings when he 
licks you for it? Not likely. Till j^ou can find a witness 
that saw me with that horse you cant touch me; and you 
know it. 

Strapper. Is that the law. Elder? 

Elder Daniels. The Sheriff knows the law. I 
wouldnt say for sure ; but I think it would be more 
seemly to have a witness. Go and round one up, Strap- 
per; and leave me here alone to wrestle with his poor 
blinded soul. 

Strapper. I'll get a witness all right enough. I 
know the road he took; and I'll ask at every house with- 
in sight of it for a mile out. Come boys. 

Strapper goes out with the others, leaving Blanco 
and Elder Daniels together. Blanco rises and strolls 
over to the Elder, surveying him with extreme disparage- 
ment. 

Blanco. Well, brother? Well, Boozy Posnet, alias 
Elder Daniels? Well, thief ? Well, drunkard? 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 97 

Elder Daniels. It's no good, Blanco. Theyll never 
believe we're brothers. 

Blanco. Never fear. Do you suppose I want to 
claim you.'' Do you suppose I'm proud of you? Youre 
a rotten brother. Boozy Posnet. All you ever did when 
I owned you was to borrow money from me to get drunk 
with. Now you lend money and sell drink to other peo- 
ple. I was ashamed of you before; and I'm worse 
ashamed of you now. I wont have you for a brother. 
Heaven gave you to me; but I return the blessing with- 
out thanks. So be easy: I shant blab. \^He turns his 
back on him and sits down^. 

Elder Daniels. I tell you they wouldnt believe you; 
so what does it matter to me whether you blab or 
not? Talk sense, Blanco: theres no time for your fool- 
ery now; for youU be a dead man an hour after the 
Sheriff comes back. What possessed you to steal that 
horse .'' 

Blanco. I didnt steal it. I distrained on it for what 
you owed me. I thought it was yours. I was a fool to 
think that you owned anything but other people's prop- 
erty. You laid your hands on everything father and 
mother had when they died. I never asked you for a 
fair share. I never asked you for all the money I'd 
lent you from time to time. I asked you for mother's 
old necklace with the hair locket in it. You wouldnt 
give me that: you wouldnt give me anything. So as 
you refused me my due I took it, just to give you 
a lesson. 

Elder Daniels. Why didnt you take the necklace if 
you must steal something.'' They wouldnt have hanged 
you for that. 

Blanco. Perhaps I'd rather be hanged for stealing 
a horse than let off for a damned piece of sentimentality. 

Elder Daniels. Oh, Blanco, Blanco: spiritual pride 
has been your ruin. If youd only done like me, youd 



98 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

be a free and respectable man this day instead of laying 
there with a rope round your neck, 

Blanco [turning on him] Done like you ! What do 
you mean? Drink like you, eh? Well, Ive done some of 
that lately. I see things. 

Elder Daniels. Too late, Blanco: too late. [Con- 
vulsively] Oh, why didnt you drink as I used to? Why 
didnt you drink as I was led to by the Lord for my 
good, until the time came for me to give it up? It was 
drink that saved my character when I was a young man; 
and it was the want of it that spoiled yours. Tell me 
this. Did I ever get drunk when I was working? 

Blanco. No; but then you never worked when you 
had money enough to get drunk. 

Elder Daniels. That just shews the wisdom of 
Providence and the Lord's mercy. God fulfils himself 
in many ways: ways we little think of when we try to 
set up our own shortsighted laws against his Word. 
When does the Devil catch hold of a man? Not when 
he's working and not when he's drunk; but when he's 
idle and sober. Our own natures tell us to drink when 
we have nothing else to do. Look at you and me ! When 
we'd both earned a pocketful of money, what did we do? 
Went on the spree, naturally. But I was humble minded. 
I did as the rest did. I gave my money in at the drink- 
shop; and I said, " Fire me out when I have drunk it 
all up." Did you ever see me sober while it lasted? 

Blanco. No; and you looked so disgusting that I 
wonder it didnt set me against drink for the rest of my 
life. 

Elder Daniels. That was your spiritual pride, 
Blanco. You never reflected that when I was drunk I 
was in a state of innocence. Temptations and bad com- 
pany and evil thoughts passed by me like the summer 
wind as you might say: I was too drunk to notice them. 
When the money was gone, and they fired me out, I 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 99 

was fired out like gold ouL of the furnace^ with my char- 
acter unspoiled and uns2:)otted; and when I went back to 
workj the work kept nie steady. Can you say as much, 
Blanco? Did your holidays leave your character un- 
spoiled? Oh, no, no. It was theatres: it was gambling: 
it was evil company: it was reading in vain romances: it 
was women, Blanco, women : it was wrong thoughts and 
gnawing discontent. It ended in your becoming a ram- 
bler and a gambler: it is going to end this evening on 
the gallows tree. Oh, what a lesson against spiritual 
pride! Oh, what a — [Blanco throws his hat at him]. 

Blanco. Stow it. Boozy. Sling it. Cut it. Cheese 
it. Shut up. " Shake not the dying sinner's sand." 

Elder Daniels. Aye: there you go, with your 
scraps of lustful poetry. But you cant deny what I tell 
you. Why, do j^ou think I would put my soul in peril 
by selling drink if I thought it did no good, as them 
silly temperance reformers make out, flying in the face 
of the natural tastes implanted in us all for a good pur- 
pose? Not if I was to starve for it to-morrow. But I 
know better. I tell you, Blanco, what keeps America to- 
day the purest of the nations is that when she's not 
working she's too drunk to hear the voice of the 
tempter. 

Blanco. Dont deceive yourself, Boozy. You sell 
drink because you make a bigger profit out of it than 
you can by selling tea. And you gave up drink yourself 
because when you got that fit at Edwardstown the doc- 
tor told you youd die the next time ; and that frightened 
you off it. 

Elder Daniels [fervently] Oh thank God selling 
drink pa3^s me ! And thank God he sent me that fit as 
a warning that my drinking time was past and gone, and 
that he needed me for another service ! 

Blanco. Take care. Boozy. He hasnt finished with 
you yet. He always has a trick up His sleeve — 



100 The She wing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

Elder Daniels. Oh, is that the way to speak of the 
ruler of the universe — the great and almighty God? 

Blanco. He's a sly one. He's a mean one. He lies 
low for you. He plays cat and mouse with you. He lets 
you run loose until you think youre shut of him; and 
then, when you least expect it, he's got you. 

Elder Daniels. Speak more respectful, Blanco — 
more reverent. 

Blanco [springing up and coming at him] Rever- 
ent! Who taught you your reverent cant.'' Not your 
Bible. It says He cometh like a thief in the night — 
aye, like a thief — a horse-thief — 

Elder Daniels [shocked] Oh! 

Blanco [overhearing him] And it's true. Thats 
how He caught me and put my neck into the halter. To 
spite me because I had no use for Him — because I lived 
my own life in my own way, and would have no truck 
with His " Dont do this," and " You mustnt do that," 
and " Youll go to Hell if you do the other." I gave 
Him the go-bye and did without Him all these years. 
But He caught me out at last. The laugh is with Him 
as far as hanging me goes. [He thrusts his hands into 
his pockets and lounges moodily arvay from Daniels, to 
the table, rvhere he sits facing the jury box]. 

Elder Daniels. Dont dare to put your theft on 
Him, man. It was the Devil tempted you to steal the 
horse. 

Blanco. Not a bit of it. Neither God nor Devil 
tempted me to take the horse : I took it on my own. He 
had a cleverer trick than that ready for me. [He takes 
his hands out of his pockets and clenches his fists]. 
Gosh! When I think that I might have been safe and 
fifty miles away by now with that horse ; and here I am 
waiting to be hung up and filled with lead ! What came 
to me ? What made me such a fool .'' Thats what I want 
to know. Thats the great secrcx. 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 101 

Elder Daniels [at the opposite side of the table] 
Blanco: the great secret now is, what did you do with 
the horse? 

Blanco [striking the table with his fist] May my 
lips be blighted like my soul if ever I tell that to you or 
any mortal men ! They may roast me alive or cut me 
to ribbons; but Strapper Kemp shall never have the 
laugh on me over that job. Let them hang me. Let 
them shoot. So long as they are shooting a man and 
not a sniveling skunk and softy, I can stand up to them 
and take all they can give me — game. 

Elder Daniels. Dont be headstrong, Blanco. Whats 
the use? [Slyly] They might let up on you if you 
put Strapper in the way of getting his brother's horse 
back. 

Blanco. Not they. Hanging's too big a treat for 
them to give up a fair chance. Ive done it myself. Ive 
yelled with the dirtiest of them when a man no worse 
than myself was swung up. Ive emptied my revolver 
into him, and persuaded myself that he deserved it and 
that I was doing justice with strong stern men. Well, 
my turn's come now. Let the men I yelled at and shot 
at look up out of Hell and see the boys yelling and 
shooting at me as I swing up. 

Elder Daniels. Well, even if you want to be 
hanged, is that any reason why Strapper shouldnt have 
his horse? I tell you I'm responsible to him for it. 
[Bending over the table and coaxing him]. Act like a 
brother, Blanco: tell me what you done with it. 

Blanco [shortly, getting up and leaving the table] 
Never you mind what I done with it. I was done out 
of it. Let that be enough for you. 

Elder Daniels [following him] Then why dont you 
put us on to the man that done you out of it? 

Blanco. Because he'd be too clever for you, just as 
he was too clever for me. 



102 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

Elder Daniels. Make your mind easy about that, 
Blanco. He wont be too clever for the boys and Sheriff 
Kemp if 3^ou put them on his trail. 

Blanco. Yes he will. It wasnt a man. 

Elder Daniels. Then what was it.^ 

Blanco [pointing upward] Him. 

Elder Daniels. Oh what a way to utter His holy 
name ! 

Blanco. He done me out of it. He meant to pay 
off old scores by bringing me here. He means to win 
the deal and you cant stop Him. Well, He's made a 
fool of me; but He cant frighten me. I'm not going to 
beg off. I'll fight off if I get a chance. I'll lie off if 
they cant get a witness against me. But back down I 
never will, not if all the hosts of heaven come to snivel 
at me in wliite surplices and offer me my life in exchange 
for an umble and a contrite heart. 

Elder Daniels. Youre not in your right mind, 
Blanco. I'll tell em youre mad. I believe they 11 let 3'^ou 
off on that. [He makes for the door]. 

Blanco [seizing him, with horror in his eyes] Dont 
go: dont leave me alone: do you hear? 

Elder Daniels. Has your conscience brought 3^ou to 
this, that 3^oure afraid to be left alone in broad daylight, 
like a child in the dark.^ 

Blanco. LjjLjjixaid-xiLJEIim and^His tricks. When 
I have you to raise the devil in me — when I have peo- 
ple to shew off before and keep me game, I'm all right; 
but Ive lost my nerve for being alone since this morn- 
ing. It's when youre alone that He takes His advan- 
tage. He might turn my head again. He might send 
people to me — not real people perhaps. [Shivering] 
By God, I dont believe that woman and the child were 
real. I dont. I never noticed tliem till they were at my 
elbow. 

Elder Daniels. What woman and what child.'' What 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 103 

are you talking about? Have you been drinking too 
hard ? 

Blanco. Never you mind. Youve got to stay with 
me : thats all ; or else send someone else — someone rot- 
tener than yourself to keep the devil in me. Strapper 
Kemp will do. Or a few of those scratching devils of 
women. 

Strapper Kemp comes back. 

Elder Daniels [to Strapper] He's gone off his 
head. 

Strapper. Foxing, more likely. [Going past Dan- 
iels and talking to Blanco nose to nose] It's no good: 
we hang madmen here; and a good job too! 

Blanco, I feel safe with you, Strapper. Youre one 
of the rottenest. 

Strapper. You know youre done, and that you may 
as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. So talk away. 
Ive got my witness; and I'll trouble you not to make a 
move towards her when she comes in to identify you. 

Blanco [retreating in terror] A woman.'' She aint 
real: neither is the child. 

Elder Daniels. He's raving about a woman and a 
child. I tell you he's gone off his chump. 

Strapper [calling to those without] Shew the lady 
in there. 

Feemy Evans comes in. She is a young woman of 23 
or 2]/., with irnpudent manners, battered good looks, and 
dirty-fine dress. 

Elder Daniels. Morning, Feemy. 

Feemy. Morning, Elder. [She passes on and slips 
her arm familiarly through Strapper's]. 

Strapper. Ever see him before, Feemy? 

Feemy. Thats the little lot that was on your horse 
this morning, Strapper. Not a doubt of it. 

Blanco [implacably contemptuous] Go home and 
wash yourself, you slut. 



104 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

Feemy [reddening, and disengaging her arm from 
Strapper's] I'm clean enough to hang you, anyway. 
[Going over to him threateningly]. Youre no true 
American man, to insult a woman like that. 

Blanco. A woman! Oh Lord! You saw me on a 
horse, did you? 

Feemv. Yes I did. 

Blanco. Got up early on purpose to do it, didnt 
you? 

Feemy. No I didnt: I stayed up late on a spree. 

Blanco. I was on a horse, was I? 

Feemy. Yes you were; and if you deny it youre a 
liar. 

Blanco [to Strapper] She saw a man on a horse 
when she was too drunk to tell which was the man and 
which was the horse — 

Feemy [breaking in] You lie. I wasnt drunk — at 
least not as drunk as that. 

Blanco [ignoring the interruption] — and you found 
a man without a horse. Is a man on a horse the same 
as a man on foot? Yah! Take your witness away. 
Who's going to believe her? Shove her into the dustbin. 
Youve got to find that horse before you get a rope round 
my neck. [He turns away from her contemptuously, 
and sits at the table rvith his bach to the jury box]. 

Feemy [following him] I'll hang you, you dirty 
horse-thief; or not a man in this camp will ever get a 
word or a look from me again. Youre just trash: thats 
what you are. White trash. 

Blanco. And what are you, darling? What are you? 
Youre a worse danger to a town like this than ten horse- 
thieves. 

Feemy. Mr Kemp: will you stand by and hear me 
insulted in that low way? [To Blanco, spitefully] I'll 
see you swimg up and I'll see you cut down: I'll see you 
high and I'll see you low, as dangerous as I am. [He 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 105 

laughs]. Oh you neednt try to brazen it out. Youll 
look white enough before the boys are done with you. 

Blanco. You do me good, Feemy. Stay by me to 
the end, wont you.'' Hold my hand to the last; and I'll 
die game. [He puts out his hand: she strikes savagely 
at it J but he withdraws it in time and laughs at her dis- 
comfiture] . 

Feemy. You — 

Elder Daniels. Never mind him, Feemy: he's not 
right in his head to-day. [She receives the assurance 
with contemptuous credulity, and sits down on the step 
of the Sheriff's dais]. 

Sheriff Kemp comes in: a stout man, with large flat 
ears, and a neck thicker than his head. 

Elder Daniels. Morning, Sheriff. 

The Sheriff. Morning, Elder. [Passing on]. Morn- 
ing, Strapper. [Passing on]. Morning, Miss Evans. 
[Stopping between Strapper and Blanco]. Is this the 
prisoner .'' 

Blanco [n*in^] Thats so. Morning, Sheriff. 

The Sheriff. Morning. You know, I suppose, that 
if youve stole a horse and the jury find against you, you 
wont have any time to settle your affairs. Consequently, 
if you feel guilty, youd better settle em now. 

Blanco. Affairs be damned! Ive got none. 

The Sheriff. Well, are you in a proper state of 
mind.'' Has the Elder talked to you? 

Blanco. He has. And I say it's against the law. 
It's torture: thats what it is. 

Elder Daniels. He's not accountable. He's out of 
his mind. Sheriff. He's not fit to go into the presence 
of his Maker. 

The Sheriff. You are a merciful man. Elder; but 
you wont take the boys with you there. [To Blanco]. 
If it comes to hanging you, youd better for your own 
sake be hanged in a proper state of mind than in an 



106 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

improper one. But it wont make any difference to us: 
make no mistake about that. 

Blanco. Lord keep me wicked till I die ! Now Ive 
said my little prayer. I'm ready. Not that I'm guilty, 
mind you; but this is a rotten town, dead certain to do 
the wrong thing. 

The Sheriff. You wont be asked to live long in it, 
I guess. [To Strapper] Got the witness all right. 
Strapper ? 

Strapper. Yes, got everything. 

Blanco. Except the horse. 

The Sheriff. Whats that? Aint you got the horse? 

Strapper. No. He traded it before we overtook 
him, I guess. But Feemy saw him on it. 

Feemy. She did. 

Strapper. Shall I call in the boys ? 

Blanco. Just a moment. Sheriff. A good appear- 
ance is everything in a low-class place like this. [He 
takes out a pocket comb and mirror, and retires towards 
the dais to arrange his hair] . 

Elder Daniels. Oh, think of your immortal soul, 
man, not of your foolish face. 

Blanco. I cant change my soul. Elder: it changes 
me — sometimes. Feemy: I'm too pale. Let me rub my 
cheek against yours, darling. 

Feemy. You lie: my color's my own, such as it is. 
And a pretty color youll be when youre hung white and 
shot red. 

Blanco, Aint she spiteful, Sheriff? 

The Sheriff. Time's wasted on you. [To Strap- 
per] Go and see if the boys are ready. Some of them 
were short of cartridges, and went down to the store to 
buy them. They may as well have their fun ; and itU 
be shorter for him. 

Strapper. Young Jack has brought a boxful up. 
Theyre all ready. 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 107 

The Sheriff [going to the dais and addressing 
Blanco] Your place is at the bar there. Take it. 
[Blanco bows ironically and goes to the bar]. Miss 
Evans: youd best sit at the table. [She does so, at the 
corner nearest the bar. The Elder takes the opposite 
corner. The Sheriff takes his chair]. All ready, Strap- 
per. 

Strapper [at the door] All in to begin. 

The crowd comes in and fills the court. Babsy, Jessie, 
and Emma come to the Sheriff's right; Hannah and Lot- 
tie to his left. 

The Sheriff. Silence there. The jury will take 
their places as usual. [They do so]. 

Blanco. I challenge this jury, Sheriff. 

The Foreman. Do you, by Gosh.'' 

The Sheriff. On what ground? 

Blanco. On the general ground that it's a rotten 
jury. [Laughter], 

The Sheriff. Thats not a lawful ground of chal- 
lenge. 

The Foreman. It's a lawful ground for me to shoot 
yonder skunk at sight, first time I meet him, if he sur- 
vives this trial. 

Blanco. I challenge the Foreman because he's preju- 
diced. 

The Foreman. I say you lie. We mean to hang 
you, Blanco Posnet; but you will be hanged fair. 

The Jury. Hear, hear ! 

Strapper [to the Sheriff] George: this is rot. How 
can you get an unprejudiced jury if the prisoner starts 
by telling them theyre all rotten? If theres any preju- 
dice against him he has himself to thank for it. 

The Boys. Thats so. Of course he has. Insulting 
the court! Challenge be jiggered! Gag him. 

Nestor [a juryman with a long white beard, drunk, 
the oldest man present] Besides, Sheriff^ I go so far 



108 The Shewlng-Up of Blanco Posnet 

as to say that the man that is not prejudiced against a 
horse-thief is not fit to sit on a jury in this town. 

The Boys. Right. Bully for you, Nestor! Thats 
the straight truth. Of course he aint. Hear, hear! 

The Sheriff. That is no doubt true, old man. 
Still, you must get as unprejudiced as you can. The 
critter has a right to his chance, such as he is. So now 
go right ahead. If the prisoner dont like this jury, he 
should have stole a horse in another town; for this is 
all the jury he'll get here. 

The Foreman. Thats so, Blanco Posnet. 

The Sheriff [fo Blanco] Dont you be uneasy. You 
will get justice here. It may be rough justice; but it is 
justice. 

Blanco. What is justice? 

The Sheriff. Hanging horse-thieves is justice; so 
now you know. Now then: weve wasted enough time. 
Hustle with your witness there, will you? 

Blanco [^indignantly bringing down his fist on the 
bar] Swear the jury. A rotten Sheriff you are not to 
know that the jury's got to be sworn. 

The Foreman [galled] Be swore for you! Not 
likely. What do you say, old son? 

Nestor [deliberately and solemnly] I say : Guilty ! ! I 

The Boys [tumultuously rushing at Blanco] Thats 
it. Guilty, guilty. Take him out and hang him. He's 
found guilty. Fetch a rope. Up with him. [They are 
about to drag him from the bar]. 

The Sheriff [rising, pistol in hand] Hands off that 
man. Hands off him, I say, Squinty, or I drop you, and 
would if you were my own son. [Dead silence]. I'm 
Sheriff here; and it's for me to say when he may law- 
fully be hanged. [They release him]. 

Blanco. As the actor says in the play, " a Daniel 
come to judgment." Rotten actor he was, too. 

The Sheriff. Elder Daniel is come to judgment all 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 109 

right, my lad. Elder: the floor is yours. [The Elder 
rises]. Give your evidence. The truth and the whole 
truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God. 

Elder Daniels. Sheriff: let me off this. I didnt 
ought to swear away this man's life. He and I are, in 
a manner of speaking, brothers. 

The Sheriff. It does you credit, Elder: every man 
here will acknowledge it. But religion is one thing: law 
is another. In religion we're all brothers. In law we 
cut our brother off when he steals horses. 

The Foreman. Besides, you neednt hang him, you 
know. Theres plenty of willing hands to take that job 
off your conscience. So rip ahead, old son. 

Strapper. Youre accountable to me for the horse 
until you clear yourself. Elder: remember that. 

Blanco. Out with it, you fool. 

Elder Daniels. You might own up, Blanco, as far 
as my evidence goes. Everybody knows I borrowed one 
of the Sheriff's horses from Strapper because my own's 
gone lame. Everybody knows you arrived in the town 
yesterday and put up in my house. Everybody knows 
that in the morning the horse was gone and you were 
gone. 

Blanco [in a forensic manner] Sheriff: the Elder, 
though known to you and to all here as no brother of 
mine and the rottenest liar in this town, is speaking the 
truth for the first time in his life as far as what he says 
about me is concerned. As to the horse, I say nothing; 
except that it was the rottenest horse you ever tried to 
sell. 

The Sheriff. How do you know it was a rotten 
horse if you didnt steal it? 

Blanco. I dont know of my own knowledge. I 
only argue that if the horse had been worth its keep, you 
wouldnt have lent it to Strapper, and Strapper wouldnt 
have lent it to this eloquent and venerable ram. [5up- 



110 The Shewlng-Up of Blanco Posnet 

pressed laughter^. And now I ask him this. [To the 
Elder\ Did we or did we not have a quarrel last evening 
about a certain article that was left by my mother, and 
that I considered I had a right to more than you? And 
did you say one word to me about the horse not belong- 
ing to you? 

Elder Daniels. Why should I? We never said a 
word about the horse at all. How was I to know what 
it was in your mind to do? 

Blanco. Bear witness all that I had a right to take 
a horse from him without stealing to make up for what 
he denied me. I am no thief. But you havnt proved 
yet that I took the horse. Strapper Kemp : had I the 
horse when you took me, or had I not? 

Strapper. No, nor you hadnt a railway train neither. 
But Feemy Evans saw you pass on the horse at four 
o'clock twenty-five miles from the spot where I took 
you at seven on the road to Pony Harbor. Did you 
walk twenty-five miles in three hours? That so, 
Feemy, eh? 

Feemy. Thats so. At four I saw him. [To Blanco\ 
Thats done for you. 

The Sheriff. You say you saw him on my horse? 

Feemy, I did. 

Blanco. And I ate it, I suppose, before Strapper 
fetched up with me. \^Suddenly and dra7natically] 
Sheriff: I accuse Feemy of immoral relations with 
Strapper. 

Feemy. Oh you liar ! 

Blanco. I accuse the fair Euphemia of immoral re- 
lations with every man in this town, including yourself. 
Sheriff. I say this is a conspiracy to kill me between 
Feemy and Strapper because I wouldnt touch Feemy 
with a pair ot tongs. I say you darent hang any white 
man on the word of a woman of bad character. I stand 
on the honor and virtue of my American manhood. I 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 111 

say that she's not had the oath, and that you darent for 
the honor of the town give her the oath because her lips 
would blaspheme the holy Bible if they touched it. I 
say thats the law; and if you are a proper United States 
Sheriff and not a low-down lyncher, youll hold up the 
law and not let it be dragged in the mud by your broth- 
er's kept woman. 

Great excitement among the women. The men much 
puzzled. 

Jessie. Thats right. She didnt ought to be let kiss 
the Book. 

Emma. How could the like of her tell the truth? 

Babsy. It would be an insult to every respectable 
woman here to believe her. 

Feemy. It's easy to be respectable with nobody ever 
offering you a chance to be anything else. 

The Women [clamo?'i7ig all together] Shut up, you 
hussy. Youre a disgrace. How dare you open your lips 
to answer your betters ? Hold your tongue and learn 
your place, miss. You painted i.lut! Whip her out of 
the town ! 

The Sheriff. Silence, Do you hear? Silence. 
[T/ie clamor ceases]. Did anyone else see the prisoner 
with the horse? 

Feemy [passionately] Aint I good enough? 

Babsy. No. Youre dirt: thats what you are. 

Feemy. And you — 

The Sheriff. Silence. This trial is a man's job; 
and if the women forget their sex they can go out or 
be put out. Strapper and Miss Evans : you cant have it 
two ways. You can run straight, or you can run gay, so 
to speak ; but you cant run both ways together. There is 
also a strong feeling among the men of this town that a 
line should be drawn between those that are straight 
wives and mothers and those that are, in the words of 
the Book of Books, taking the primrose path. We dent 



112 The She wing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

wish to be hard on any woman; and most of us have a 
personal regard for Miss Evans for the sake of old 
times; but theres no getting out of the fact that she has 
private reasons for wishing to oblige Strapper, and that 
— if she will excuse my saying so — she is not what I 
might call morally particular as to what she does to 
oblige him. Therefore I ask the prisoner not to drive us 
to give Miss Evans the oath. I ask him to tell us fair 
and square, as a man who has but a few minutes between 
him and eternity, what he done with my horse. 

The Boys. Hear, hear! Thats right. Thats fair. 
That does it. Now Blanco. Own up. 

Blanco. SheriflF: you touch me home. This is a 
rotten world; but there is still one thing in it that re- 
mains sacred even to the rottenest of us, and that is a 
horse. 

The Boys. Good. Well said, Blanco. Thats straight. 

Blanco. You have a right to your horse, Sheriff; 
and if I could put you in the way of getting it back, I 
would. But if I had that horse I shouldnt be here. As 
I hope to be saved. Sheriff — or rather as I hope to 
be damned; for I have no taste for pious company and 
no talent for playing the harp — I know no more of that 
horse's whereabouts than you do yourself. 

Strapper. Who did you trade him to? 

Blanco. I did not trade him. I got nothing for him 
or by him. I stand here with a rope round my neck 
for the want of him. When you took me, did I fight 
like a thief or run like a thief; and was there any sign 
of a horse on me or near me? 

Strapper, You were looking at a rainbow like a 
damned silly fool instead of keeping your wits about 
you; and we stole up on you and had you tight before 
you could draw a bead on us. 

The Sheriff. That dont sound like good sense. 
What would he look at a rainbow for? 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 113 

Blanco. I'll tell you. Sheriff. I was looking at it 
because there was something written on it. 

Sheriff. How do you mean written on it? 

Blanco. The words were, " Ive got the cinch on you 
this time, Blanco Posnet." Yes, Sheriff, I saw those 
words in green on the red streak of the rainbow; and as 
I saw them I felt Strapper's grab on my arm and Squin- / 
ty's on my pistol. i 

The Foreman. He's shammin mad: thats what he 
is. Aint it about time to give a verdict and have a bit 
of fun. Sheriff? 

The Boys. Yes, lets have a verdict. We're wasting 
the whole afternoon. Cut it short. 

The Sheriff [making up his mind] Swear Feemy 
Evans, Elder, She dont need to touch the Book. Let 
her say the words. 

Feemy. Worse people than me has kissed that Book. 
What wrong Ive done, most of you went shares in. Ive 
to live, havnt I ? same as the rest of you. However, it 
makes no odds to me. I guess the truth is the truth and 
a lie is a lie, on the Book or off it. 

Babsy. Do as youre told. Who are you, to be let 
talk about it? 

The Sheriff. Silence there, I tell you. Sail ahead. 
Elder. 

Elder Daniels. Feemy Evans: do you swear to tell 
the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, 
so help you God? 

Feemy. I do, so help me — 

Sheriff. Thats enough. Now, on your oath, did 
you see the prisoner on my horse this morning on the 
road to Pony Harbor? 

Feemy. On my oath — [Disturbance and crowding at 
the door]. 

At The Door. Now then, now then ! Where are 
you shovin to? Whats up? Order in court. Chuck 



114 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

him out. Silence. You cant come in here. Keep 
back. 

Strapper rushes to the door and forces his way out. 

Sheriff [savagely] Whats this noise.'' Cant you 
keep quiet there.'' Is this a Sheriff's court or is it a 
saloon .'' 

Blanco. Dont interrupt a lady in the act of hanging 
a gentleman. Whores your manners ? 

Feemy. I'll hang you, Blanco Posnet. I will. I 
wouldnt for fifty dollars hadnt seen you this morning. 
I'll teach you to be civil to me next time, for all I'm not 
good enough to kiss the Book. 

Blanco. Lord keep me wicked till I die ! I'm game 
for anything while youre spitting dirt at me, Feemy. 

Renewed Tumult At The Door. Here, whats this.'' 
Fire them out. Not me. Who are you that I should 
get out of your way? Oh, stow it. Well, she cant come 
in. What woman.'' What horse.'' Whats the good of 
shoving like that .'' Who says .'' No ! you dont say ! 

The Sheriff. Gentlemen of the Vigilance Commit- 
tee: clear that doorway. Out with them in the name of 
the law. 

Strapper [nnthout] Hold hard, George. [At the 
door] Theyve got the horse. [He comes in, followed 
by Waggoner Jo, an elderly carter, who crosses the court 
VG the jury side. Strapper pushes his way to the Sher- 
iff and speaks privately to him]. 

The Boys. What! No! Got the horse! Sheriff's 
horse.'' Who took it, then.'' Where.'' Get out. Yes it 
is, sure. I tell you it is. It's the horse all right enough. 
Rot. Go and look. By Gum ! 

The Sheriff [to Strapper] You dont say! 

Strapper. It's here, I tell you. 

Waggoner Jo. It's here all right enough. Sheriff. 

Strapper. And theyve got the tliief too. 

Elder Daniels. Then it aint Blanco. 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 115 

Strapper. No: it's a woman. [^Blanco yells and 
covers his eyes rvith his hands]. 

The Whole Crowd. A woman ! 

The Sheriff. Well, fetch her in. [Strapper goes 
out. The Sheriff continues, to Feemy] And what do 
you mean, you lying jade, by putting up this story on 
us about Blanco.'' 

Feemy. I aint put up no story on you. This is a 
plant: you see if it isnt. 

Strapper returns with a woman. Her expression of 
intense grief silences them as they crane over one an- 
other's heads to see her. Strapper takes her to the cor- 
ner of the table. The Elder moves up to make room 
for her. 

Blanco [terrified] : that woman aint real. You take 
care. That woman will make you do what you never 
intended. Thats the rainbow woman. Thats the woman 
that brought me to this. 

The Sheriff. Shut your mouth, will you. Youve 
got the horrors. [To the woman] Now you. Who are 
you? and what are you doing with a horse that doesnt 
belong to you.^ 

The Woman. I took it to save my cliild's life. I 
thought it would get me to a doctor in time. It was 
choking with croup. 

Blanco \^strangling, and trying to laugh] A little 
choker: thats the word for him. His choking wasnt real: 
wait and see mine. [He feels his neck with a sob]. 

The Sheriff. Where's the child.'' 

Strapper. On Pug Jackson's bench in his shed. 
He's makin a coffin for it. 

Blanco [with a horrible convulsion of the throat — 
frantically] Dead ! The little Judas kid ! The child 
I gave my life for ! [He breaks into hideous laugh- 
ter]. 

The Sheriff [^jarred beyond endurance by the sound] 



116 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

Hold you noise ! will you ? Shove his neckerchief into 
his mouth if he dont stop. [To the woman] Dont you 
mind him, maam : he's mad with drink and devilment. I 
suppose theres no fake about this. Strapper. Who found 
her? 

Waggoner Jo. I did, Sheriff. Theres no fake about 
it. I came on her on the track round by Red Mountain. 
She was settin on the ground with the dead body on 
her lap, stupid-like. The horse was grazin on the other 
side of the road. 

The Sheriff [pttszled] Well, this is blamed queer. 
[To the woman] What call had you to take the horse 
from Elder Daniels' stable to find a doctor.'' Theres a 
doctor in the very next house. 

Blanco [mopping his dabbled red crest and trying to 
be ironically gay] Story simply wont wash, my angel. 
You got it from the man that stole the horse. He gave 
it to you because he was a softy and went to bits when 
you played off the sick kid on him. Well, I guess that 
clears me. I'm not that sort. Catch me putting my neck 
in a noose for anybody's kid ! 

The Foreman. Dont you go putting her up to what 
to say. She said she took it. 

The Woman. Yes: I took it from a man that met 
me. I thought God sent him to me. I rode here joy- 
fully thinking so all the time to myself. Then I noticed 
that the child was like lead in my arms. God would 
never have been so cruel as to send me the horse to dis- 
appoint me like that. 

Blanco. Just what He would do. 

Strapper. We aint got nothin to do with that. This 
is the man, aint he.'' [pointing to Blanco]. 

The Woman [pulling herself together after looking 
scaredly at Blanco, and then at the Sheriff and at the 
jury] No. 

The Foreman. You lie. 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 117 

The Sheriff. Youve got to tell us the truth. Thats 
the law, you know. 

The Woman. The man looked a bad man. He 
cursed me ; and he cursed the child : God forgive him ! 
But something came over him. I was desperate. I put 
the child in his arms ; and it got its little fingers down 
his neck and called him Daddy and tried to kiss him; 
for it was not right in its head with the fever. He said 
it was a little Judas kid, and that it was betraying him 
with a kiss, and that he'd swing for it. And then he 
gave me the horse, and went away crying and laughing 
and singing dreadful dirty wicked words to hymn tunes 
like as if he had seven devils in him. 

Strapper. She's lying. Give her the oath, George. 

The Sheriff. Go easy there. Youre a smart boy. 
Strapper; but youre not Sheriff yet. This is my job. 
You just wait. I submit that we're in a difficulty here. 
If Blanco was the man, the lady cant, as a white woman, 
give him away. She oughtnt to be put in the position 
of having either to give him away or commit perjury. 
On the other hand, we dont want a horse-thief to get off 
through a lady's delicacy. 

The Foreman. No we dont; and we dont intend he 
shall. Not while I am foreman of this jury. 

Blanco [^with intense expression] A rotten foreman! 
Oh, what a rotten foreman ! 

The Sheriff. Shut up, will you. Providence shows 
us a way out here. Two women saw Blanco with a 
horse. One has a delicacy about saying so. The other 
will excuse me saying that delicacy is not her strongest 
holt. She can give the necessary witness. Feemy Evans : 
youve taken the oath. You saw the man that took the 
horse. 

Feemy. I did. And he was a low-down rotten 
drunken lying hound that would go further to hurt a 
woman any day than to help her. And if he ever did a 



118 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

good action it was because he was too drunk to know 
what he was doing. So it's no harm to hang him. She 
said he cursed her and went away blaspheming and 
singing things that were not fit for the child to 
hear. 

Blanco [troubled] I didnt mean them for the child 
to hear, you venomous devil. 

The Sheriff. All thats got nothing to do with us. 
The question you have to answer is, was that man 
Blanco Posnet.'' 

The Woman. No. I say no. I swear it. Sheriff: 
dont hang that man : oh dont. You may hang me instead 
if you like : Ive nothing to live for now. You darent take 
her word against mine. She never had a child: I can 
see it in her face. 

Feemy [stung to the quick] I can hang him in spite 
of you, anyhow. JNIuch good your child is to you now, 
lying there on Pug Jackson's bench ! 

Blanco [rushing at her with a shriek] I'll twist your 
heart out of you for that. [They seise him before he can 
reach her]. 

Feemy [mockijig at him as he struggles to get at her] 
Ha, ha, Blanco Posnet. You cant touch me; and I can 
hang you. Ha, ha! Oh, I'll do for you. I'll twist your 
heart and I'll twist your neck. [He is dragged back to 
the bar and leans on it, gasping and exhausted.] Give 
me the oath again, Elder. I'll settle him. And do you 
[to the woman] take your sickly face away from in front 
of me. 

Strapper. Just turn your back on her there, will 
you? 

The Woman. God knows I dont want to see her 
commit murder. [She folds her shawl over her head]. 

The Sheriff. Now, Miss Evans: cut it short. Was 
the prisoner the man you saw this morning or was he 
not? Yes or no? 



The Sliewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 119 

Feemy [a little hysterically] I'll tell you fast enough. 
Dont think I'm a softy. 

The Sheriff [losing patience] Here: weve had 
enough of this. You tell the truth, Feemy Evans; and 
let us have no more of your lip. Was the prisoner the 
man or was he not? On your oath? 

Feemy. On my oath and as I'm a living woman — 
[flinching] Oh God! he felt the little child's hands on 
his neck — I cant [bursting into a .flood of tears and 
scolding at the other woman] It's you with your sniv- 
elling face that has put me off it. [Desperately] No: 
it wasnt him. I only said it out of spite because he 
insulted me. May I be struck dead if I ever saw him 
with the horse ! 

Everybody draws a long breath. Dead silence. 

Blanco [whispering at her] Softy! Cry-baby! 
Landed like me ! Doing what you never intended ! 
[Taking up his hat and speaking in his ordinary tone] 
I presume I may go now, Sheriff. 

Strapper. Here, hold hard. 

The Foreman. Not if we know it, you dont. 

The Boys [barring the way to the door] You stay 
where you are. Stop a bit, stop a bit. Dont you be in 
such a hurry. Dont let him go. Not much. 

Blanco stands motionless , his eye flxed, thinking hard, 
and apparently deaf to what is going on. 

The Sheriff [rising solemnly] Silence there. Wait 
a bit. I take it that if the Sheriff is satisfied and the 
owner of the horse is satisfied, theres no more to be said. 
I have had to remark on former occasions that what is 
wrong with this court is that theres too many Sheriffs 
in it. To-day there is going to be one, and only one; 
and that one is your humble servant. I call that to the 
notice of the Foreman of the jury, and also to the no- 
tice of young Strapper. I am also the owner of the 
horse. Does any man say that I am not? \^Silence\. 



1^0 The Shewing-tTp ot Blanco I*osnet 

Very well, then. In my opinion, to commandeer a horse 
for the purpose of getting a dying child to a doctor is 
not stealing, provided, as in the present case, that the 
horse is returned safe and sound. I rule that there has 
been no theft. 

Nestor. That aint the law. 

The Sheriff. I fine you a dollar for contempt of 
court, and will collect it myself off you as you leave the 
building. And as the boys have been disappointed of 
their natural sport, I shall give them a little fun by 
standing outside the door and taking up a collection for 
the bereaved mother of the late kid that shewed up 
Blanco Posnet. 

The Boys. A collection. Oh, I say! Calls that 
sport? Is this a mothers' meeting.'' Well, I'll be jig- 
gered ! Where does the sport come in ? 

The Sheriff [continuing] The sport comes in, my 
friends, not so much in contributing as in seeing others 
fork out. Thus each contributes to the general enjoy- 
ment; and all contribute to his. Blanco Posnet: you go 
free under the protection of the Vigilance Committee for 
just long enough to get you out of this town, which is 
not a healthy place for you. As you are in a hurry, I'll 
sell you the horse at a reasonable figure. Now, boys, 
let nobody go out till I get to the door. The court is 
adjourned. [He goes out]. 

Strapper [to Feemy, as he goes to the door] I'm 
done with you. Do you hear? I'm done with you. [He 
goes out sulkily], 

Feemy [calling after him] As if I cared about a 
stingy brat like you! Go back to the freckled may- 
pole you left for me: youve been fretting for her long 
enough. 

The Foreman [To Blanco, on his way out] A man 
like you makes me sick. Just sick. [Blanco makes no 
sign. The Foreman spits disgustedly, and follows Straps 



The She wing-Up of Blanco Posnet 121 

per out. The Jurymen leave the box, except Nestor, who 
collapses in a drunken sleep]. 

Blanco [Suddenly rushing from the bar to the table 
and jumping up on it] Boys, I'm going to preach you 
a sermon on the moral of this day's proceedings. 

The Boys [crowding round him] Yes: lets have a 
sermon. Go ahead, Blanco. Silence for Elder Blanco. 
Tune the organ. Let us pray. 

Nestor [staggering out of his sleep] Never hold up 
your head in this town again. I'm done with you. 

Blanco [pointing inexorably to Nestor] Drunk in 
church. Disturbing the preacher. Hand him out. 

The Boys [chivying Nestor out] Now, Nestor, out- 
side. Outside, Nestor. Out you go. Get your subscrip- 
tion ready for the Sheriflf. Skiddoo, Nestor. 

Nestor. Afraid to be hanged ! Afraid to be hanged ! 
[At the door] Coward! [He is thrown out]. 

Blanco. Dearly beloved brethren — 

A Boy. Same to you, Blanco. [Laughter]. 

Blanco. And many of them. Boys: this is a rotten 
world. 

Another Boy. Lord have mercy on us, miserable 
sinners. [More laughter], 

Blanco [Forcibly] No: thats where youre wrong. 
Dont flatter yourselves that youre miserable sinners. 
Am I a miserable sinner? No: I'm a fraud and 
a failure. I started in to be a bad man like the 
rest of you. You all started in to be bad men 
or you wouldnt be in this jumped-up, jerked-oflf, 
hospital-turned-out camp that calls itself a town. I took 
the broad path because I thought I was a man and not 
a snivelling canting turning-the-other-cheek apprentice 
angel serving his time in a vale of tears. They talked 
Christianity to us on Sundays; but when they really 
meant business they told us never to take a blow without 
giving it back, and to get dollars. When they talked the 



122 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

golden rule to me, I just looked at them as if they 
werent there, and spat. But when they told me to try 
to live my life so that I could always look my fellowman 
straight in the eye and tell him to go to hell, that 
fetched me. 

The Boys. Quite right. Good. Bully for you, 
Blanco, old son. Right good sense too. Aha-a-ah! 

Blanco. Yes; but whats come of it alLf" Am I a 
real bad man? a man of game and grit? a man that does 
what he likes and goes over or through other people 
to his own gain? or am I a snivelling cry-baby that let 
a horse his life depended on be took from him by a 
woman, and then sat on the grass looking at the rain- 
bow and let himself be took like a hare in a trap by 
Strapper Kemp : a lad whose back I or any grown man 
here could break against his knee? I'm a rottener fraud 
and failure than the Elder here. And youre all as rot- 
ten as me, or youd have lynched me. 

A Boy. Anything to oblige you, Blanco. 

Another. We can do it yet if you feel really bad 
about it. 

Blanco. No: the devil's gone out of you. We're all 
frauds. Theres none of us real good and none of us 
real bad. 

Elder Daniels. There is One above, Blanco. 

Blanco. What do you know about Him? you that 
always talk as if He never did anything without asking 
your rotten leave first? Why did the child die? Tell 
me that if you can. He cant have wanted to kill the 
child. Why did He make me go soft on the child if 
He was going hard on it Himself? Why should He gO 
hard on the innocent kid and go soft on a rotten thing 
like me ? Why did I go soft myself ? Why did the Sher- 
iff go soft? Why did Feemy go soft? Whats this p-amfi. 

that upsets our gamej For_ seems., to _me th eres tw_Q_ 

games bein played. Our game is a rotten game that 



The She wing-Up of Blanco Posnet 123 

makes me feel I'm dirt and that ynnre all ns rnffpn c[\rf. 

as me. TWTipr gamp mfiy hp f^ fj l ^^J g«rnp ; h ilt _ '*^ 

aint, rotteq ,. When tlie Sheriff played it he stopped 
being rotten. When Feemy played it the paint nearly 
dropped off her face. WJieH—L played it I cursed 
"l^SSJ^ ^"'' ^ fool; but I lost tke rotten feel a ll the 
saiae. 

Elder Daniels. It was the Lord speaking to your 
soul, Blanco. 

Blanco. Oh yes: you know all about the Lord, dont 
you.'' Youre in the Lord's confidence. He wouldnt for 
the world do anything to shock you, would He, Boozy 
dear .f* Yah ! What about the croup ? It was early days 
when He made the croup, I guess. It was the best He 
could think of then; but when it turned out wrong on 
His hands He made you and me to fight the croup for 
him. You bet He didnt make us for nothing; and He 
wouldnt have made us at all if He could have done His 
work without us. By Gum, that must be what we're for ! 
He'd never have made us to be rotten drunken black- 
guards like me, and good-for-nothing rips like Feemy. 
He made me because He had a job for me. He let me 
run loose til the job was ready; and then I had to come 
along and do it, hanging or no hanging. And I tell you 
it didnt feel rotten: it felt bully, just bully. Anyhow, 
I got the rotten feel off me for a minute of my life; and 
I'll go through fire to get it off me again. Look here ! 
which of you will marry Feemy Evans.'' 

The Boys [uproariously] Who speaks first? Who'll 
marry Feemy? Come along, Jack. Nows your chance, 
Peter. Pass along a husband for Feemy. Oh my! 
Feemy ! 

Feemy [shortly] Keep your tongue off me, will you? 

Blanco. Feemy was a rose of the broad path, wasnt 
she? You all Lhought her the champion bad woman of 
this district. Well, she's a failure as a bad woman ; and 



124 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 

I'm a failure as a bad man. So let Brother Daniels 
marry us to keep all the rottenness in the family. What 
do you say, Feemy? 

Feemy. Thank you; but when I marry I'll marry a 
man that could do a decent action without surprising 
himself out of his senses. Youre like a child with a 
new toy : you and your bit of human kindness ! 

The Woman. How many would have done it with 
their life at stake? 

Feemy. Oh well, if youre so much taken with him, 
marry him yourself. Youd be what people call a good 
wife to him, wouldnt you.'' 

The Woman. I was a good wife to the child's father. 
I dont think any woman wants to be a good wife twice 
in her life. I want somebody to be a good husband to 
me now. 

Blanco. Any offer, gentlemen, on that understand- 
ing? [The boys shake their heads]. Oh, it's a rotten 
game, our game. Here's a real good woman ; and she's 
had enough of it, finding that it only led to being put 
upon. 

Hannah. Well, if there was nothing wrong in the 
world there wouldnt be anything left for us to do, would 
there ? 

Elder Daniels. Be of good cheer, brothers. Fight 
on. Seek the path. 

Blanco. No. No more paths. No more broad and 
narrow. No more good and bad. Theres no good and 
bad; but by Jiminy, gents, theres a rotten game, and 
theres a great game. I played the rotten game; but the 
great game was played on me; and now I'm for the great 
game every time. Amen. Gentlemen: let us adjourn to 
the saloon. I stand the drinks. [He jumps down from 
the table]. 

The Boys. Right you are, Blanco. Drinks round. 
Come along, boys. Blanco's standing. Right along to 



The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet 125 

the Elder's. Hurrah! [They rush out, dragging the 
Elder with them], 

Blanco [to Feemy, offering his hand] Shake, Feemy. 

Feemy. Get along, you blackguard. 

Blanco. It's come over me again, same as when the 
kid touched me. Shake, Feemy. 

Feemy. Oh well, here. [They shake hands]. 



LBFe14 



THE 

SHEWING-UP OF 
BLANCO POSNET 

WITH PREFACE ON THE 
CENSORSHIP 

By 

BERNARD SHAW 




NEW YORK 
BRENTANO'S 

1913 

Price 40 cents net 



WORKS OF 

BERNARD SHAW 

Dramatic Opinions and Essays. 2 vols. Net, $2.50 

Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. 2 vols. Net, $2.50 

John Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara, 

Net, $1.50 

Man and Superman Net,%\.25 



Three Plays for Puritans 



The Doctor's Dilemma, Getting Married, and 

The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. Net, $1.50 

The Quintessence of Ibsenism . . . $1.00 

Cashel Byron's Profession .... $1.25 

An Unsocial Socialist $1.25 

The Irrational Knot $1.50 

The Author's Apology Net, .60 

The Perfect Wagnerite $1.25 

Love Among the Artists $1.50 

The Admirable Bashville : A Play . . Net, .50 

Postage or Express, Extra 



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THREE PLAYS 

BY BRIEUX 

(Member of ihe French Academy) 

MATERNITY 

DAMAGED GOODS 

THE THREE DAUGHTERS OF 

MONSIEUR DUPONT 

WITH PREFACE BY BERNARD SHAW 
Translated into English 

By Mrs. BERNARD SHAW, ST. JOHN HANKIN 
and JOHN POLLOCK 

1 2 mo. Cloth, price $1.50 net 

"In that kind of comedy," writes BERNARD SHAW, 
" which is so true to life that we have to call it tragi-comedy, 
and which is not only an entertainment but a history and a 
criticism of contemporary morals, BRIEUX is incomparably 
the greatest writer France has produced since Moliere." 

The three plays in this volume are a first instalment into 
English of the work of a man who has been admitted into the 
French Academy for his splendid achievements, and who is 
recognized by the best thinkers in Europe as one of the pro- 
foundest moral forces expressing itself as Hterature to-day. 

No earnest man or woman can read these plays without 
being deeply moved and deeply touched. One of the plays 
was read by Brieux himself, at the special invitation of the 
pastor, from the pulpit of a church in Geneva. 

BRENTANO'S 

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BERNARD SHAWS 
PLAYS 

The following Plays by Bernard Shaw are issued 
in separate volumes, bound in stiflf paper wrappers. 

Price 40 cents net per volume 

WIDOWERS' HOUSES 

THE PHILANDERER 

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION 

ARMS AND THE MAN 

CANDIDA 

YOU NEVER CAN TELL 

THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE 

THE DEVIUS DISCIPLE 

CiESAR AND CLEOPATRA 

CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND'S CONVERSION 

MAN AND SUPERMAN 

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND 

MAJOR BARBARA 

THE MAN OF DESTINY, AND HOW HE 

LIED TO HER HUSBAND 
THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA 
GETTING MARRIED 
THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET 
PRESS CUTTINGS 

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